Survivor's Tale
by StellarRequiem
Summary: What happened to Yori between Tron & Tron Legacy: Yori tells her story to a group of programs in an unstable post-Legacy grid. One of the listeners is a hooded figure that you may recognize. ;D along the way, we'll encounter Tron/Rinzler, Clu, & others.
1. Introduction: Here I Am

This place is moving backwards.

Over a thousand cycles ago, I came here. I was invited by Flynn, the only user I have met, the one whom others so reverently referred to as "The Creator."

I never called him that.

To me, he was a far more complex enygma. Never too serious, yet always so determined; so unlike a god, yet in defiance of every natural law of the system, despite his casual manner.

When I first met him, I was under the impression that he was a program like myself, just a conscript. To some extent, that sense of equal footing never left me. While he made me curious and perhaps unnerved at times, I never saw him the way Tron did. He was never _my_ user.

_My _user, Lora, was smart, efficient, pleasant, and highly impersonal in regards to me, and I miss her to an impossible degree for that. I miss her exacting commands, the exultation of crunching numbers and forming something from the strings of bare data she sent my way. Despite everything I have done and been through, in all of it I have never felt more useful than I did working for her.

But I gave her up. I gave her up because there was someone else, here, that meant more to me than any user.

I gave her up for Tron.

Tron is why I've done what I've done, and am doing what I'm doing. He is why I'm sitting in the poorly lit bar, watching as people come and sit around me, their eyes and ears waiting to hear my story that I don't want to tell, but will tell all the same.

I _have_ to tell it, really. Like I said, the grid is moving backwards, devolving. I have to tell this story because it will give hope back to these programs, and hope may be the one thing that can keep this place from unraveling completely.

Greetings, programs. My name is Yori.


	2. The State of Things

Greshim used to be a member of the Black Guard. When Clu was derezzed, for some reason, he collapsed into stand-by mode, and rose again as a purposeless basic program with circuitry of dull white that looks gray to me from across the table. He has tired eyes and pallid flesh under dark hair that been shot through with lighter tones.

Beside him sits Radi, in unbroken black, her red hair hanging in a jagged wedge over one of her eyes and a gloved hand on the table. She's been a part of the resistance for so long, nobody remembers who she was before.

Serax, a young program who's spent the better part of the last cycle derezzing members of the Black Guard in the street, sits to Greshim's other side. His counterpart Ti, with circuitry so pink in color my eyes have trouble looking at her, was once one of the most ardent supporters of Clu's ideals in all the grid. She is now a part of the vanguard for free expression among the grids citizens, having decided that if perfection cannot be maintained by a ruling power, it must be achieved by a self motivated drive by all programs to reach beyond their original, limited parameters. I like to agree with her, but can never make myself believe it will ever really happen.

A program who introduces himself as Mav is also sitting down beside me now. He's wearing orange, but in a paler shade than that of the Black Guard. I don't know his story, or the stories of the three other newcomers pulling up chairs. Around me at other tables, other programs are turning to listen as well.

All of them are unique beings. Some were once devout supporters of Clu's manifesto of a ideal system, who believed that the grid was perfection and that Clu was the embodiment of that perfection. Others were once labeled as fanatics, and sequestered away their dedication to User's cycle after cycle, believing against all odds that they had been written with a purpose by a much higher power.

In between the two extremes are still more groupings; survivalists who would go along with anything, resistors who fought for the grid itself, carefree spectators of the happenings around them who spent their tie in clubs and at the stadium, worried everyday citizens just trying to get by and stay off the game grid, the list goes on and on.

All of these demographics are present to hear me, and they are all dealing with different challenges now that both Flynn and Clu are gone. The Black Guard, without guidance, has been trying to do the only thing it knows how to do. Citizens who are slowly realizing that they now answer to no one at all have been resisting them. Death is the guards' punishment for these civilians. Mobs, in return, have derezzed almost all of Clu's old forces, even those who did nothing more than monitor foot traffic at the games.

Working programs have either taken to doing nothing _but_ work, or have abandoned productivity altogether. Things are starting to collapse as a result; our infrastructure is done for, the grid bugs are returning, and it all seems it will get worse.

We are tense as a people now and easily led to violence without the security of a working system. There isn't a program left who doesn't know how to use its disc to kill and maim. None of them are sure anymore who they are supposed to be to stay alive.

I am thinking about all of these things as I begin to tell my story.


	3. Stranger

"I met Tron in the old system, a place most of you probably don't remember, or never saw," I begin, "when he was young; still in that brief span of time between when a program has been written, and when a user has activated it. I had been around somewhat longer.

"There was something about him, though. Something that ran so deeply, it was if he was a part of my code before he'd ever come to exist. Nothing in my programming explicitly said 'love Tron,' but we came together so naturally that sometimes it seemed that was exactly had happened." The programs listening to me are looking around at each other, or at their feet at my references to love. For many of us who have been living within the crushing parameters of Clu's ideals, real love is a concept so inexplicable (and therefore imperfect) that it's become taboo. I feel a pulse of thrilled energy run through my circuits as I begin to open their minds.

I continue:

"We lived together, until he was activated. As soon as the Master Control program," their faces tell me that I'll need to elaborate on this for them, "found out what he was, he was taken to the game grid to fight to his death. But the MCP never counted on Tron. He was defiant, efficient, devout, and the finest warrior any system has ever known. And he had one purpose, to fight for the users..."

As I go on, I can see their eyes lightening. I see awe and admiration; joy in the happy ending of our first adventure, their concern over how this story is bound to change when I reach more recent events.

I also notice _him_ for the first time; a mysterious program sitting at the bar itself, but pivoted towards me as if to listen. His outfit is lit too minimally for me to determine the color of his circuitry from this angle. He is also wearing a hooded cloak that hides his face but the end of his nose, and the flat, hardened expression on his thin mouth. Even stranger though, he has no disc. No weapon. No viable identity.

There's something about this stranger, however, that calls to me deep within the most basic files of my memory. There's something familiar about the curve of his shoulders, the expression on the lips, the way of listening without acknowledging.

I'm watching him as I tell my story, but gradually, I become so engrossed in the words I'm sharing that the memories start sliding across my vision. I'm not seeing what's actually in front of me anymore. I'm watching it all happen. I feel like I'm actually there.

* * *

Author's note: Worry not, this will transition into a normal narrative as she gets caught up in telling it, the whole thing won't be recounted in quotes! Thanks for reading! :D

End of Line.


	4. The Last Kiss

Programs tend to forget that there are scattered colonies outside of Tron City... or at least, that there were. In the User's year of 1989, that's where I lived. As I had done time and time again, I had sacrificed one thing I loved for another when I came there. While Tron City was beautiful, advanced, and growing in a kind of overwhelming splendor, surprisingly little was being done there that required the particular skill sets of my programming. At least, not to an extent that was challenging. I had begun to wither away under the monotony, ease, and boredom. And so, I came to Tron, and confessed to him that I needed to go somewhere else.

It was not what he wanted. It wasn't even what I wanted. But we both knew exactly how bad it was getting. I was running diagnostics on non-existent prototypes in my head with nowhere to develop them, sipping into reveries wherein I tried to solve unsolvable problems. I'd drained myself into stand-by doing it on more than one occasion. It worried him.

Typical for Tron, he didn't attempt subtlety when I confronted him.

"Yori," he told me, "Of course you should go." There was more to it than that, of course, but I still smile when I think of that line. It was just such classic Tron. His eyes were sad, his mouth drawn into a perfect line, his eyebrows knitting together and tucked down over his eyes, so much the opposite of sweetness and affection; but his words were sharp, commanding, without question, and that spoke of the gravity with which he meant them. He wanted to see me happy again, whatever the cost. He was simply not one to have ever, as Flynn would say, "sugar coat" things.

What happened after that... isn't important here. But that's how I came to live across the outlands on the far shore of the Sea of Simulation, while Tron remained across that impossible distance defending the city.

The colonies needed him sometimes too, however. And then he would come to me and everything stopped; work, everything. It would be just us for the next 3 milicycles, 6, 9, however long we had, just as soon as he'd accomplished what he'd come for. Or, other times, I _was_ all he came for.

The last time I saw him... properly, was one of those times.

We spent a long while together that time. We didn't leave my quarters for . . . several milicycles, to say the least. He had always liked it there. I have enough of the old system in me to miss neon color, and I had filled it floor to ceiling with color in my own style: the geometric design of this system with the vibrant shades and detail of the old. I think it reminded him of a simpler time.

He had fallen into standby in my bed at some point, and stayed that way for such a long time that I half expected him to reboot as a new program.

When he finally did wake up, his hair had been smashed flat on one side, and was sticking out in every possible direction on the other. I smoothed it down with my gloved hand while he explained, enjoying the contrast between the light brown of his hair and the old-system blue of my uniform's finger lights, which, strangely enough, were a mirror to his.

"It's Clu again," he sighed. I knew what would follow. This wasn't the first time he had vented such concerns with Clu's erratic and daring behavior.

"Not only is he touting himself as the Creator's image here on the grid, now, but he's beginning to act like him," Tron hissed in exasperation, "And since the incident with the Sea of Simulation... he doesn't seem to have limitations anymore, Yori. I'm not sure how much longer it will be before he starts believing that he _is_ the Creator."

I must've looked startled at that conclusion, because he twisted his lip and looked at me rather ruefully.

"That's the same reaction I keep getting from Flynn," he said, "He doesn't understand the gravity of what's happening here. His perception of reality prevents him from seeing how very real this is to us. He believes he understands, but he is still _not_ of our world, so how can he?" He sounded increasingly frustrated as he spoke. I could understand why. His faith was troubling him. Flynn was troubling all of us, those days. I placed my hand on his face.

"Tron, you don't believe that. You've always said that we must forgive him because he _is_ of both worlds," he threw me a flat but affectionate look with his tired eyes for disproving him, "The real problem is that he cannot _live_ in both. One must always be secondary, a place that he visits. He isn't going to understand unless you make him see things as we do.

"He comes here to be happy. Maybe he doesn't want to see the bad. Take him around the grid, and make him see the things that we do. Has he stopped and just... had a dink somewhere? Heard the talk in the power bars, the clubs? Has he seen what Clu has done with the games? Derezzing losers?" His dark blue eyes were brightening as I spoke, and as my intensity increased, I noticed that the white rectangle of circuitry at his elbow was throbbing with my own blue color beneath my fingertips.

"If anyone can make him see things from our level, Tron," I concluded fervently, "it's you."

He looked up at me. (I was taller than him at that moment since he was still half sitting up from slumber, and I was sitting with my knees tucked under me on my bed.) He looked that way for a long moment, and then he smiled in that one way he had, a little more so with one side of his mouth than the other.

"I can always count on you, can't I?" he said warmly. It wasn't the first time he'd used those exact words, but I smiled, remembering.

"Always," I said, and I bent my head to press my lips on his.


	5. Greetings Programs

News from Tron City didn't take as long to arrive as one might've expected... but news from our neighboring colonies came even faster. Specifically, news from those open to ISOs. Lone survivors drifted in, all that were all that were left to speak of their homes' decimation and the new reign on the grid. The reign of Clu.

I asked everyone that came into the colony if they had heard news of Tron, and those fleeing Clu gave me nervous glances, while those simply passing the news looked at me as if I were somehow funny for asking.

Then came the real message. Members of the Black Guard, and a program called Jarvis working under Clu, arrived in the center of our small city, and presented its entire populace with the news that our world as we knew it was coming to an end.

"Greetings, Programs! Today, our great luminary Clu..." He began. It sickened me. I could feel flickers of discomfort running base code outward over the entirety of me. He kept speaking while I squirmed internally. Warning messages flashed across my eyes, telling me not to trust his words.

"And the false creator... has fled to the outlands, abandoning you, fellow programs, while he walks certainly into his own deresolution," he continued. He didn't mention Tron.

I lifted my chin, and reached up. The fashion variations were greater then, but it still held true that only old system programs wereknown to wear something on their heads, and at that time, I used to have a hood that stemmed straight up from the neck of my uniform, emblazoned down the back of my skull with blue circuitry. I peeled it off, leaving my less conspicuous hair. Back then I wore it twined from the bangs back into a braid down the center of my head. It was less noticeable this way, and I knew from Tron that old system programs, like ISOs, were not a favorite of Clu's. Our code structure, not necessarily made by Flynn, is alien to him. It makes us difficult, I now know, to repurpose and order around. I couldn't stay silent. But I didn't want to be dead, either.

"AND WHAT OF TRON?" I shouted over the crowd, shattering the dramatic pause in the speech. The crowd went silent. "WHAT OF OUR CHAMPION?" Murmurs swelled up around me like waves on the Sea of Simulation.

The program Jarvis, a distasteful, bald man with a visor hanging over is eyes from his scalp, narrowed his eyes at me from his high post aboard a "burning" orange ship, and scowled. ..

"Burning?" Serax stops me.

"It's a user word. When you work with them for as many cycles as I did, you learn," I explain ruefully, and then cite the model of the ship I'm describing, something Serax would recognize. He nods, but others still seem confused.

"Black Guard orange," Greshim cuts in, his voice flat, broken and mechanical. Understanding lights on faces.

Everyone is quiet for a moment, remembering the way that army came down upon them in the beginning. They recall the fear, the awe, and the way it all changed before the end. The stranger, too, lowers his head in the background. I can't see his face, but I sense he is remembering something as well...

I looked back at the program in defiance. He smirked at me. Rage coursed through me, and for a moment I felt the acquiescence of my pacifist base code to the more combat ready upgrades I'd received to appease a worrisome Tron and Flynn. My hand inched towards the baton that clung to my thigh.

I dared Jarvis to deceive me with a look across the crowd. He paused a moment longer before he answered, and the silence made the crowd shift uneasily.

"It was known that if Flynn were permitted to return to his world, he would damage or destroy ours from the outside. Our great leader's only choice was to have him quietly arrested. The_ traitor_ Tron," he drew out the word traitor, sharpening his voice on it, "derezzed all SIX innocent arresting guardsman, and abetted the flight of the oppressor Kevin Flynn. He was an imperfection and a traitor to his race, and our exulted leader has rectified this imperfection like any other."

He smiled again and looked straight ahead as if to continue. I was growing cold at my core, but I raised my voice again, this time I wasn't the only one. A multitude of outraged voices cried out.

"What do you mean, rectified?"

At that time, Clu wasn't known for reprogramming people, and it wasn't known that someone's original code could be entirely stamped out by forceful, unrelenting new code writing over the top of it. That's why, when Jarvis responded, all the power drained from me, I glowed dully, and nothing but the self preservation commands I carried in me kept me from powering down and collapsing right thereto whatever end.

What it was he said, after a long pause and a slow smile, was:

"Program, what do you _think_ it means?"

_NO._

I wanted to pretend he was lying to me, but no warning messages crossed my vision. It had to be true. Imperfection rectified.

Error messages flashed across my eyes at last as all the emotions and their accompanying programmed reactions vied simultaneously for my attention. I thought I might overload. It was too much. One program couldn't take so much shock, horror, and pain.

But it was true. The worst had happened.

Tron was dead.

* * *

Author's note: Thanks everybody who's read this far! There's plenty more to come if you want it, and your reviews are always welcome in the meantime.

P.S. I've had to set the scene a little first, but there will be real thrills to come soon!

End of line. XD


	6. Return to Tron City

Self preservation is a powerful thing, written into grid inhabitants as simple as a bit or as complicated as Clu. I wasn't sure how much I cared anymore, but despite my conscious decision to give up, innately I understood that I was going to have to survive. And to do that, I couldn't stay in the colonies. Amidst their limited population, I stood out like Abraxas. Blue circuitry, hooded clothes, I radiated "old system" as blatantly as the opening portal used to signal Flynn's arrival. In the city though, I knew that blending in might be an easier task. Amidst so many programs, if I kept my head down and did my job, maybe I stood a chance. And if I could get a foothold there, I could reinvent myself. In the colonies, on the other hand, the time it took to do that much was running out. The only big plans Clu had for us, it seemed, was to collect our population of unwanteds, and then shut us down.

I left at a quiet moment, shutting down the circuitry in my quarters, deleting the programming that made it distinct, closing the door on it forever.

I walked out of town by making my way from one side street to side street, running from the shield of one building to the shadow of the next, watching the sky for recognizers as I pressed myself up against the walls of my small city. That colony had many layers to it, building on itself like structures in the old system, and I went deep as I flitted from shadow to shadow.

When the city was finally behind me, I walked for some time more, flattening myself against the cold ground of the outlands as perimeter sweeps were conducted by our new so called "protectors." It all reminded me of running form the MCP with Tron, all those cycles ago. This made sadness run through my code with such force I thought my other functions might have to shut down to make room for it, but of course, that never happened. Instead, I kept standing again, and walking on. My code prioritized self preservation over grief.

When I was far enough away that the city looked small to me, glimmering on the horizon, I reached for my baton. I was never one of the greats among lightcyclists, but I could drive as well as anyone along a direct route. I closed my eyes, told myself not to look back, and engaged my cycle.

A moment later I was shooting across the rough terrain of the outlands, thankful that I possessed the files for a cycle of Flynn's "off road" capable design. In fact, my cycle was the same model Tron's had been...

I closed up the memory abruptly. I wasn't going to think about it.

The journey was long, and not comfortable. The terrain jostled me, forcing me to take jumps and swerve around random, jutting formations in the landscape. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to have Flynn there, just so I could scream myself into standby mode.

I wanted to tell him about how stupid it was to create these cold but strangely beautiful outlands of hard ground and utterly random patterns. I wanted to tell him how he should have constructed roads to the colonies instead of mass transit systems. I wanted to scream at him about creating Clu, and for leaving us here, cycle after cycle. For making Tron pick up the slack, trying to protect everyone from themselves, from their environment, the ISOs and programs from each other. I wanted to shout out everything I had at him for not seeing how perfect this place was before it was messed with, for not seeing how perfect it could have been, for not staying long enough to understand what it was like to call the grid home. I wanted to scream at him for a full cycle and not stop. I wanted to show him that I hated him for running away. How could someone on whom we placed so much just disappear? How many more of us who he had called friend were going to die before this was over? How many more whom he had created, but never knew?

I closed my eyes under my helmet. Something wet and cool was running down my cheeks. I bit my lip, and kept riding. It was all that I could do.

When Tron City came into view at last, I was relieved. However, I was also terrified, and saddened to the point where I felt unwell. Diagnostics said I was fine, but somehow I distrusted them. If I only I could run a diagnostic _on_ my diagnostics...

The city grew closer. It wasn't what it was meant to be, I could see that clearly. It was gleaming and beautiful, but shot through with angry, diseased looking patches of the Black Guards' orange, like the city itself was infected.

Still, there was no turning back . . . and my troubles had only just begun. As I approached the city, guardsmen were waiting for me.


	7. A Secret Fear

"You didn't stand a chance against us," says Greshim, flatly pulling me from the reverie of memory files, "coming into the city without someone already there to sneak you in."

I make a face and absently rub the back of my head, mussing up my hair.

"I didn't have anybody else. And I hadn't figured out that I could make forged discs yet," I said.

That's what I've been doing for the better part of the last 600 cycles; using my knowledge of construction to help the resistance. Nowadays, you're more likely to catch me programming a forged disk or an outfit download for disguise than prototyping a new solar sailor.

The outfits are some of the most important things I do, actually. The ones we're born in aren't really designed to come off, after all. Temporary downloads and upgrades are really the only way to change them without laser-torching them off and starting from scratch, and surprisingly few of us know how to program our own. In that respect, all my playing around during off hours back in my old system quarters have paid off. That's what has allowed me to survive. The Yori all of these people are watching isn't wearing the blatant uniform she came here in anymore. Not exactly, anyway.

The body of it, the Y formed by the tiny squares that's centered below the triangle on my chest, the line of circuitry running down my throat, the curved collar of light framing the triangle, the sideways, elongated triangles that follow the curve of my hips, the bars of circuitry down the front of my thighs, they're all the same cerulean blue. But the circuits running down the shins and around the back of my boots, the lights on the gloves I replaced the old ones with after I torched them off, they're all white now. So is the border on the long, wide sleeved jacket I wear now. My hair, too, is different. It's down, no hood. Sharp, flaring blond layers fly wildly and freely around my face, down to my shoulders. While Clu was in power, I masked my disk in white, too, but these days, its back to itself.

Blue, with white. I'm the only multicolor program I know, but it suits who I am now. My one fear is that if Tron, or Rinzler, (or whoever he is now,) is still out there, he wouldn't even recognize me.

* * *

Author's Note: I know I promised action, but it just occured to me that I created a whole new image for Yori now that she's in the new system, but none of you knew what it was! So there you go. Thanks again for reading!

End of Line.


	8. Welcome Wagon

I didn't technically even make it into the city itself before they caught on to me. There was a guard, in a tower for that exact purpose that hadn't been here the last time I'd seen Tron city, who was already reporting my presence as I pulled up. I glanced up at him, and then down the long road before me. My best bet had to be to accelerate into the city, try not to hit any pedestrians, and fly off into some side street. Then I could close up the cycle and try and blend into the crowd...

In neon blue. Not likely.

Maybe if I just flew passed the guy and weaved through the place till I lost them... or maybe if I stopped and just acted like I had nothing to hide... Not that I did. Not like I deserved to feel like I did, anyway.

I lifted my chin in defiance as I looked up at the guard. So what, I was old. There was no reason I didn't have the same right to live and work as any young, fresh, naive creation of Flynn. I was Lora's program, from the Encom system. I was Yori, brought here by Kevin Flynn himself and more qualified than half the basic programs in this system.

As a long row of eight guards began to fill the street before me, I had already made my own decision to stop. I did, retracting my cycle back into my baton, feet hitting the ground as it disappeared from beneath me. I made contact with the street already in stride towards the team of guardsmen blocking my path. The visor of my helmet retracted back into my hood, and I faced them.

"I thought this was a free system," I said as I stepped up to the leader of their formation. He was dauntingly tall, and the circles in the jaw of his helmet reminded me of the jaws of a gridbug. I thought it was rather appropriate.

"Why can't I pass?" I continued, adding the tone of an irritated, but also slightly frightened, innocent traveler in place of that of a defiant refugee to my own city.

The big, insect-like program just stared at me through the glistening, daunting blackness of his helmet. the surface of it seemed to swallow light whole, dully reflecting it's echoes back to me without even my own reflection to provide expression.

"Identify." he said after a moment. His voice was so processed, so mechanical, and then distorted behind his helmet, it seemed as if it hadn't come from him at all, but crawled out the ground of the grid itself. It sounded like sizzling, shorted circuitry. It sounded like a badly operating light jet. It sounded like the beam that carried my pride and joy, the solar sailor, had just been disrupted.

I flinched back a step, a hand moving to my baton, my other arm coming up in an automatic defensive response to the level of my chest.

As my hand moved towards the baton, each of them took a sudden, flawlessly and frighteningly coordinated step towards me, their staffs ready. I froze, looking around at the group with wide eyes. But I didn't answer them.

The big middle one glowered down at me again.

"Identify." He rumbled.

I narrowed my eyes at him, but warning messages were starting to flash with increasing frequency before me, and I was too alert to their readied weapons and overwhelming numbers. Deep in my code was the voice of reason, saying "Yori, don't push it."

I swallowed and answered.

"My name is Yori," I said, "and I'm a utility program specializing in prototyping and construction . . . Why does it matter?"

They didn't respond, but the big one started thrumming like he was firing up some kind of internal processor. Then he made a clicking noise and addressed me again.

"What is your location of origin?"

"Tron city," I said, leaning up towards him and daring him with my eyes. Technically... in this system, that _was_ my place of origin, so I wasn't really lying.

The Black Guard didn't have a reputation for being smart. Most of them were pretty basic, single purpose programs reliant on orders from someone higher up; very easily modified, but very, very efficient. Of course, I had no such luck. However succinct he was, or however task focused he may have been, the guard looming over me was not at _all_ stupid.

"State your age," he commanded instead, and he had me. Any guard of Clu's would have the programming to identify a lie, but if I told the truth, id be giving myself away as one of Clu's least favorite program types: the old system, "alien" type.

"I've been here since the grid's inception," I said slowly, glancing away from him.

"State your age." he repeated.

There was no was out of this one. I was done for regardless of what I said, so long as I played by their rules. No matter which way I answered, my only real choice was whether or not I would go quietly.

Go quietly. How could I? How could I stand by and become another piece of Clu's master plan? Clu, who killed Tron. Clu who was destroying ISOs in the streets and forcing programs onto the game grid to fight to the death. Even if it ended me, wasn't one moment of defiance, one chance to get in his way, to disrupt the perfection of his system, wasn't it worth it? Besides, as likely as I was to be derezzed for trying, I was _guaranteed_ deresolution or worse if I just let them have me.

I glanced towards the guard tower on my right. If I had just a nano, and could catch them off guard... I had a light cable in my baton I could fasten to that tower. If I could pull myself up and away, then I could swing wide around the tower, maybe make a break for it. . . I'd just have to run like there was a fleet of tank programs behind me and not stop . . . Easier said than done. I looked back into the blackness of the guards helmet, then back to the tower. I ran calculations. I was simulating in my head.

_Yori,_ I told myself, _you can do this. _The voice of the internal advice sounded like Tron's.

I looked right at the guard, and did a quick internal conversion. I handed him an age in microcycles, without specifying the unit. It would have been a sad and desperate, petty attempt n any other situation; but it had literally nothing to do with his programming. It gave him just the pause I needed all the same.

In one fluid movement, I pulled my baton, and sent the cable flying. It made contact, and I was being lifted from the ground, flying up over their heads, when something sharp and electrical went fizzing through my body, radiating from the center of my back outwards.

I shrieked involuntarily, a warning message fizzled haphazardly before me with minimal resolution, and my hands went stiff. I dropped the baton, fell to the ground, and shut down. The last sound I processed was my useless baton clattering to the ground ahead of me, just out of reach.

* * *

Author's note: I really know nothing about computers. I had to google some technobabble for this chapter. If it's completely wrong, or you have some computer savvy to share, please let me know! Thanks.

End of line.


	9. Survivor

I groaned as I rebooted. I must have been out for a long while, as I was stiff all over, and my disc was digging into my back where it was mounted to me. As I opened my eyes, it took a nano for things to start to come into focus. At first, everything was pixilated. I couldn't tell where I was.

As the view became clearer, I realized that I was staring up at a ceiling. It had a vaguely green hue to it, but I was mostly struck by the grayness. It was flat and steely, very unwelcoming, and definitely not designed for aesthetics. I traced it with my eyes, noting where the black walls met it. There was a distinctly light green glow there along the edges and in the corners where the four walls met each other.

I sat up slowly, grimacing as my weak arms moved to prop me up. Looking down at my legs I could see that I had been dropped in here, not laid down kindly. My right leg was straight, lying across my left, which was bent and laying flatly with the side of my thigh and calf pressed against the floor. My circuitry was disturbingly dull, glowing so lightly it was bordering on white. I shook my head slowly from side to side, trying to clear up my perception. I felt vague and distant despite my efforts.

Finally it occurred to me that I was desperately low on power; a situation that was, ironically, the reason I couldn't place what was wrong with me in the first place.

Not sure what else I could do for myself, given the circumstances, I reached out carefully and manually pulled my left leg out from under my right, and straightened it. It was stiff and painful.

Twisting and stretching, I looked behind me and saw a neutral, gray, rectangular block that was supposed to serve as a bed. Whoever dropped me in here didn't have the common courtesy to at least leave me in a despondent pile somewhere other than the floor, apparently.

Who _had _left me here? I couldn't remember what had happened. I closed my eyes, and focused. Pulling up the memory files took an alarming amount of power though. I gave up, and groaned, falling back to the floor. This sent a shockwave of pain from my lower back, and it all returned to me at once.

_Everything old is new again_, I thought. I hadn't realized that electric shock was still a characteristic of the guard's staffs. Guards in the old system had used them, I knew that, but I hadn't expected it from Clu's men. My protesting back was sending angry signals to scold me for this naivety.

I reached down and felt the place where they'd hit me. There was nothing different about it, but it still hurt . . . not that I was surprised by this. If they'd zapped me hard enough to knock me out, it was no small shock.

Now that I was aware of what had happened, I was also able to interpret exactly where I was. This place, modeled after the holding cells in the old system, was where Clu had been placing all of those programs who'd been disappearing into the guard's clutches. What awaited these programs was uncertain, but I assumed I'd be presented soon enough with the simple option of "serve Clu or die." From what I'd been seeing on the outside, I suspected that was the kind of tactic he was adopting. I supposed that it could also be possible that he'd throw some new code into me if he thought I was worth it; but once again, I still hadn't realized the full extent to which repurposing could actually be taken. Not that I wouldn't find out soon enough.

I was just trying to sit up again when one full wall fizzled out and revealed itself to be a projection across a force field which I could see through.

The guard on the other side was smaller than the others I'd encountered, with a more basic helmet, but still touting the orange of Clu's minions. He punched in a code to a screen on the outside of the wall that I couldn't see, and the force field derezzed to about waist level. He pulled out a vial of power, and threw it into the cell with me. He watched for a moment, waiting to see if I would drink it, and then seemed to decide that it didn't matter anyway if I powered down and derezzed or not. He punched in another code. The force field restored, and went black.

I looked at the hard, black vial that had landed beside me. Something about it brought back a memory.

I recalled sitting down on the floor of another cell, one I had shared with Kevin Flynn on Sark's ship, waiting to derezz. I'd been so ready to give up then, so filled with a sense of failure. I hadn't seen yet what we could accomplish.

Then again . . . what had we accomplished? We had had a user's help. I'd even kissed him as thanks for everything he'd done. Well, partly in thanks, partly as goodbye. And maybe a little of it was curiosity, a little awe, and maybe a little of it just me giving in to the magnetism of a superior being and his ideas of affection. And maybe it was for saving my life.

As much as I hate myself for it though, I also have to admit that, whatever the other reasons, in the end it was mostly because I wanted to. And because of that, maybe none of the other reasons mattered anyway.

It didn't mean I loved Tron any less, but from that moment on there would always be that much less that I could give to him for it, because I had given a certain amount of it away to Flynn instead. The fact remains that I enjoyed the taste of Flynn's mouth, the foreign way his lips moved, the solidity of his body and the difference in its shape from Tron's. The fact remains that when I saw him after that, I would always think back on that experience . . . and every time I kissed Tron, I would always know that it didn't matter if we were the only programs who had any knowledge of this user ritual of passion, because he was not the only one with whom I'd shared it.

I loved kissing Tron. Kissing is possibly my favorite discovery that I have made in the course of my life. Still, I have to hate myself for making it. I'll never feel anything but confusion and distress because of that one, first kiss.

Maybe that's the reason Flynn and I didn't really maintain contact with one another the way he and Tron did. Tron and I belonged together, and Flynn was no supplement, but having him in the mix was uncomfortable because of everything else that he came with. ("Everything else" being the mystery, the temptation, the confusion, and the feeling of being divided, that is.)

Besides, Tron had always been touchy about Flynn's attitude towards me . . . if there was anything that could have ever made him stand in Flynn's way or go against him, it was me. He knew what had happened between Flynn and I, and it was the one thing he never forgave him for, even if we had both expected that Flynn was jumping to his death at the time.

Facing death . . . just as I was now. This time, though, there was no confusing Flynn to save me, and no beloved Tron to suddenly come back from the dead and defeat the enemy. Knowing all of this, I stared at the vial and thought seriously for the second time in my life about giving up.

The next thing I knew, I was reaching for the power vial, unscrewing the top, and tossing it back with a vengeance. I'd grown since then. I was a survivor now. I didn't need Flynn to save me, and I had realized that the way to morn Tron was to do anything _but_ surrender. That's not what he would have wanted.

I don't know how it happened, but something changed as I decided this. As the power seeped into me, something about my code changed. My job had been to make things, but suddenly, I didn't feel that was my purpose at all. My purpose was to fight in any manner I could: To fight for Tron in his stead, to fight for the programs I'd been living alongside for cycles, to fight for the home that I loved and had helped to build.

Those pugnacious, battle ready upgrades took over. Sweet little Yori was still there, but her priorities had just changed. I reached automatically for my baton. It was gone, taken from me. I scowled, and reached back over my shoulder for my disk instead. I was less skilled with this than with my baton, but when they came back for me, I was still going to be ready.

If they had expected me to surrender, they were very, very wrong.


	10. The Stranger Smiles

"Wait, wait wait wait," it's Serax that's stopping me, "you seriously planned to pull a disc on a member the Black Guard, while cornered in a cell under the game grid, with minimal battle upgrades, on a single power boost?" The look on his youthful face is rueful and disbelieving.

I lean across the table towards him, folding and elbow and laying my right arm across it so I can get as close to his face as possible over it's rounded, glassy surface. Empowered by my story, I'm loosening up now for the first time in cycles, and aiming for dramatic effect. My playful side, to my surprise, appears to still be alive.

"Serax, you baby program you. I _did_ pull a disc on the Black Guard. While cornered. In a holding cell." His eyes widen, and I'm smiling at him rather wickedly, with no exposed teeth, the corner of my mouth pulled far, far up on the left side. I lift an eyebrow and look at him as if I'm daring him to question me.

His expression falls flat, and he leans back in his chair as if he's suddenly uncomfortable being so close. I feel a little thrill run through me, and know my circuitry is probably glowing just that much brighter with the fun I'm having dispelling his attitude.

Still smirking, I say:

"Now, if you'll believe it, I'll tell you how that went for me. And if you pay very close attention, you might even learn something."

Several of the older members of our group, excluding Radi, laugh. Since most of us have a history with an exceptional amount of trauma involved, and the rest of us are being broken down by the reality of this new, leaderless grid, it's the dry laugh of programs who have almost forgotten how laughing is done. Still, it's a laugh. And their faces are engaged, and if not happy, at least clear and processing, not withdrawn and dwelling on our dark, collapsing world or the violence that permeates the city outside.

Serax crosses his arms and looks at me as if he's scanning me.

"I'm not sure if you have a glitch in that self preservation code you mentioned, or if you're just senile," he says. There's awe in his voice under his facetious tone.

My eyes narrow, and I almost move out of my chair.

"Program, did you just call me old?"

I'm joking. Of course I'm old, regardless of how I look. And he's joking, too. But the look of terror that suddenly lights in his face when he misinterprets me as beings serious is enough to knock me backwards into my chair with laughter. It's an amazing feeling; if a little bitter because of my sense of its absence for the last several hundred cycles.

He scowls at me in chagrin. At this, other programs in the bar outside of our exclusive group begin to loosen up as we. Smiles and laughter lighten the room in a literal sense as circuits pulse a little brighter for the first time since Clu's reintegration.

I look around the table. Radi is smirking, and that's the closest thing she has to a smile. Greshim's expression is as blank and introverted as usual, but his eyes are soft and bright. Serax is grinning at me sheepishly with closed lips and shaking his head, while Ti wraps her hands around the bicep of his crossed arm and giggles at him. Mav, too, is relaxed far back in his chair, his newness to our circle forgotten as he watches the goings on. He's not exactly smiling, but his young face is clearly amused.

I look over Serax's shoulder and see that even the hooded stranger in the back has taken notice of the lifting atmosphere. In place of the cold, hard, line of a mouth there is now the hint of a smile. It's just an echo; tired and heavy, but it's warm. I don't suspect he even realizes that I'm looking or that I noticed. That hidden little smile is nice though, somehow, done just a little more so with one side of his mouth than the other . . .

* * *

Author's note: Ten chapters went fast! Sheesh! Thanks to all of you who have signed up for story alerts, favorited this, or REVIEWED! I hope to have plenty more coming, but the writer's block is starting to rear its ugly head, so keep your fingers crossed. (Actually, it's not writer's block so much as me reeeeaaallly just wanting to skip ahead to a certain purring, helmet wearing badass, but same difference.)

Or, if you'd like to help me, out, I'm trying to put together a playlist to listen to as I write this, and your suggestions are totally welcome if you have any. Thanks!

End of line.


	11. Escape

In the lapse between the guard's visits to me, I came to a compromise within myself that had my disc, once again, planted firmly in its place on my back. Not that I was backing down. I'd realized after sitting there and staring off into my own memory files for awhile in an angry reverie that I needed to cycle down and consider some actual tactics besides hurling my disc at anyone who opened the door. As satisfying as that would probably be as an act of vengeance, it would do very little to actually save me . . . and revenge wasn't really in line with my essential programming, anyway. The satisfaction wouldn't last.

Instead, I'd adopted the passive position of sitting with my hands curled in my lap, my disc innocently out of the way on my back, my head lowered toward the floor like they'd broken me .

. . . As if that really could be done so easily.

I realized that I would probably have to take the helpless act fairly far before anyone believed it, but I was pretty well prepared. I'd spent the last milicycle reviewing every memory file that could possibly be used as a model. By the time the wall fizzled out and revealed itself once again for what it was, I'd realized that helpless Yori (particularly when she was collapsing, stumbling, or looking otherwise distressed,) was the most effective version of myself to present to male programs if I wanted to get somewhere.

Just like the last time, a guard opened the force field partially, and reached over it to drop a vial to the floor. I looked up at him, running an old file on light jet prototypes across my vision so that my eyes would look as unfocused as possible. I assumed it was working, since I couldn't even see him beyond the schematics that cluttered my vision.

I stared at him like that for a nano, keeping my head limp on my neck, and then moved as if to stand. As I drew one foot away from the bed, and leaned my weight onto it, I disengaged the knee joint, and went hurtling forward in a calculated tumble.

From that moment on, I was playing a game of careful self management. I sent a power reserve command to dim my circuits, and hoped for the best. I had to lie perfectly still for what seemed like forever with my mouth hanging open and the side of my face pressing into the cold floor. It was an extreme exercise in control.

I could almost sense the guard deliberating on what to do. I was afraid for a moment that he'd leave me for dead and I'd have to stay like this, wary of surveillance, until the shift changed in another milicycle. He came through for me, though. A hum of dissatisfaction resonated out of his helmet, and I heard the force field derezz.

The guard took a step into the cell, then another. He stood over me, and pressed the toe of his boot into my side. I groaned a horrible, weakened, a desperate moan, and fluttered my eyelids erratically for a brief moment. He made a ponderous noise at this, and kneeled down over me.

Time to go.

I pressed my palms into the floor and launched myself upwards, tucking my knees and pulling my feet under me in one movement, while reaching simultaneously for my disc.

He went for his baton in the same moment, reeling back and scrambling to his feet. The baton began extending into a blade, so I abandoned normal disc tactics in exchange for speed.

I swung the disc out flat in front of me, using the guards upward motion combined with a downward jerk of my arm to smash the its flat surface over his helmet. The helmet in question split in a thousand directions and shattered into fragments of pixilation. The guard collapsed.

I grabbed his baton from the floor, jumped over his unconscious form, and punched a string of code into the pad on the wall outside. I was suddenly very glad that I'd taken the time to help prototype these force fields all those cycles ago, seeing how much good hacking them was doing now . . . Of course, things had changed since then. The last time I'd last seen them, they _were_ just prototypes, and designed for true criminals. We did see those on the grid from time to time after all. Usually though, the rogue behavior was a result of code damage, and they just needed to be contained until Flynn was back to help. Hence the holding cells.

The force field sizzled to life under my command and sealed the doorway between me and the limp form of the guard. He didn't look like he was at risk of derezzing, and I was relieved that maybe I'd be able to make my escape without killing anyone. Regardless of what self preservation and battle upgrades may have told me, my base code still held out against the idea of killing anyone.

Looking around I realized that the black projections on the insides of the force fields were one sided. I could see a long line of greenish, sizzling squares that ran floor to ceiling down either side of the hallway, each with programs visible behind them. I had to look at the floor as I ran past them, knowing that I couldn't possibly stop and save them all, but also wanting nothing more than to do just that. I made a silent promise to myself that I would be back to do that someday, whatever else I did.

I was running with my disc in hand, now engaged and humming with deadly energy. In my other hand I carried the guard's baton. Its energy was foreign to me, and pulsated out of sync with my own, but I felt confident that I could handle it. After all, batons are all the same, really. It's not like I had just tried to take over somebody's _disc . _. .

At that moment, my thought was disrupted by the appearance of three more guards down the hall from the corner I had just turned. I skidded to a halt, but it was too late. They had seen me.

I turned tail and ran back down the hallway from whence I'd come. I could hear their shouts and commands, heavy and mechanical behind their helmets, as they came after me. Their footsteps thudded across the floor.

I stopped again, and turned, placing my disc on my back once more, and taking hold of either end of the pilfered baton. I started running towards the oncoming guard. I'd just had an idea.

The guard turned the corner, the three of them with batons extending into staffs or blades. If I hadn't have stolen that baton, I would have been dead right then.

Instead, the game had changed in my favor. And I really wished they had been wearing helmets I could see through, because at that moment, I would have liked to have seen their faces . . .

Suffice it to say, that they were a little surprised when turned that corner to find me barreling down the hallway on a stolen lightcycle.


	12. Light Grenades

The guards scattered in every direction as I passed them, and I engaged the light trail on my cycle as I swept by . . . just so they'd stay down.

Too determined to escape and too preoccupied to indulge, I let the urge pass to howl with exhilaration. I was burning as brightly as the portal, excitement coursing through me. It made my energy contagious, and my bike melted from orange to neon blue. And seeing as I was already going to be flying out of a cell block and onto the street in front of everyone, the fact that the color was conspicuous was rapidly become the least of my worries.

I wasn't driving well. As I've said, I'm not a master cyclist, and to make things worse, the cycles weren't made to be handled indoors in the first place. I was ramming into walls as I took corners, and I narrowly missed shattering the cycle several times. As I took one risky corner after the other though, internal schematic review told me that freedom was about to be mine.

A light appeared at the end of the inky hallway, and I threw myself forward onto the hand grips, twisting my wrists towards the doorway and accelerating the cycle to its maximum potential as guards began to fill the space between me and freedom.

I didn't want to kill them.

But I was not stopping this cycle. I wasn't entirely sure that I could, for that matter. I'd given myself up to my upgrades.

"MOVE!" I shrieked at them desperately, even as I drew my disc out from behind my back. I don't believe they processed a bit of it.

They _must_ have re- processed this image of me, though, hurtling toward them like a blue and black bolt of electricity, with a disc held at the ready; because they split apart willingly at the last moment, diving out of my way as I came flying out into the waiting area for the stadium. It was filled with programs, all waiting for the games to start. I wondered vaguely if Clu had made audience to the barbaric competitions mandatory, because I'd never seen so many programs in attendance.

I had to slam the edge of my disc down into the ground in order to gain the leverageto make the first necessary turn. A female program shrieked as I narrowly avoided running her over.

Pivoting on my disc, I turned 300 degrees and shot off in another direction as I returned it to my back.

But something was wrong.

My peripheral vision had picked up on something, and was sending vibrant warning messages across my gaze. I looked, and found that the alert was a response to one of the guards. He was back on his feet, his baton extended towards me, pulling up something that was mounted against his thigh and attaching it to his light cable.

Desperately dodging civilians, I accelerated again. But I was too late.

His light cable came flying after me, forcing programs to duck out of its way, each of them hitting the ground painfully.

The end of the cable snapped up against the back of my cycle, and I heard the unmistakable ticking, beeping, countdown of a light grenade. Warning messages flashed like fireworks.

I accelerated further, frantic to get the imminent explosion to occur away from all of these innocents.

The grenade kept ticking.

I ran through files and schematics and analyzations in an instant, trying to identify the remaining life in the bomb. A countdown timer flicked into view in the upper right hand corner of my vision, and I careened forward, following the shape of the arena, running towards the rear of it, and the outlands, and nothingness.

Nanoseconds ticked by.

5:00

I wasn't going to make it any farther.

4:00

The cycle would go no faster.

3:00

I was running out of time.

2:00

I had to get off of it.

1:00.

I released the hand grips and vaulted myself off of the cycle, but too late. My timer was off.

I went flying, along with the shattered remnants of the lightcycle, the white heat, and the shockwave from the explosion. The part of the cycle that rose up over my back to shield it was forced up against me. It sliced into me, and I could feel massive sections of code breaking apart as it did.

Broken, and still breaking, I hit the ground once before bouncing up, and then coming down on my other side. I skipped like that a couple times before sliding across the ground and impacting something else hard and cold. I was too far gone by that point to know what it was; just that my back impacted it, but that my legs kept sliding. Inertia bent my already shattered body around the object, and things went black for good.


	13. Changes in the Room

I look around at the programs who are watching me, stopping in my narrative to allow the seeming finality of what I have just described process for them. They look at me in wonder, and I am suddenly glad, however bitter the feeling is, that I am telling them everything.

All that I am saying is doing all that I intended. This is all going to be worth it, whatever end it comes to.

I'm bringing them defiance. I'm offering them inspiration. I am giving them hope.

That hope is in their faces, in the atmosphere of the room. And there is something else that isn't hope yet, but that could be transformed into it, in the expression now playing across the welcoming shape of the stranger's mouth.

* * *

Author's note: Ok, so I lied about making this chapter into the big reveal about what happenes next, sorry. XD

However, I felt she needed a moment of vindication here in the present, and more imortantly, there are key attitude changings sneaking into her train of thought that you all must observe as they happen . . . and are happening. RIGHT NOW. There are big things in this little chapter everyone, I promise.

End of line.

PS. For those of you who ARE peeved by this chapter's tiny-ness, don't worry. There's more coming soon!


	14. Sentencing

The first sensation I had was simultaneously a feeling as well as an image, one generated internally by my aching code in place of a warning message. There wasn't enough of me functional for even that, so my systems were improvising in a somewhat abstract manner.

At first the image was of an innocuous thing, a slippery yellow line twisting and jerking and twining in and out of the patterns of my code, just glowing in the solid blackness that was all I could see. It ducked and leaped over the statutes of my programming, making hypnotizing progress through me.

The sliver of yellow burrowed deeper and deeper, seeping into the cracks of broken code, leaving them whole again, but pulsating and sickly with yellow glow. I could feel it moving, slick and deceitful, dogged and determined.

Find and repair defaults began to activate, and the broken code hissed as a blue light, quick and warm and radiating, closed in on the yellow patchwork.

Diagnostics began to run. Red and green, schematics of my own pixels and code, they all broke through as solid images. The yellow streak continued its patterns, sliding around functional operations, hiding behind them.

Suddenly, things all began to open at once. Files exploded wide, programs executed and ceased function repeatedly, streams of data and binary command flew through it all like intersecting roadways, and I realized that I was simply undergoing the most grueling reboot of my life.

The yellow line moved faster. Its sliminess was palpable, even internally. True warning systems began to operate and I was alerted to the alien nature of this particular projection. Yellow was unhealthy. Yellow was a warning alert. Yellow was Abraxas. Yellow was infection . . .

The hot little line suddenly disappeared from my internal projections as my head began to focus solely on reality once again; but in its wake I was aware of something horrible and new. The line was, in reality, a foreign force, and now it was trying to change me. . .

Everything suddenly rushed back. Yellow was Clu.

A progress bar flashed in front of me, gone in an instant as the reboot was forcefully rushed to completion and my eyes opened to blinding light. Everything was blurry and too bright, but my sense of equilibrium spoke to my being on my side, somebody's hands at my back, running commands into my disk.

I shrieked and jerked myself upright, swinging around and forcing the soles of my feet into the chest or stomach of the blur of yellow and black that was invading me. I couldn't tell specifically where I'd kicked him, but I didn't care.

In that same moment, I was greeted by the sound of my own scream of agony, and I collapsed back to my side on whatever surface I was lying on, eyes shut tight and limbs curling inward as I fought the pain. My back felt like it was being ripped to shreds, derezzed pixel by pixel by something about as delicate and dexterous as a hunk of outland rock.

A dark chuckle cut through the pain, yet somehow added to my agony.

"Well now. You _are_ a tough little program, aren't you?" said a voice, and I grimaced back at it, emitting only an incomprehensible snarl through my clenched teeth that was as much screaming as it was an attempt at words.

The condescending and threatening voice sounded just like Flynn's, but without the levity, the carelessness, or the roughness of exhaustion. I knew _exactly _who was scoffing at me, even if the pain prevented me from opening my eyes to his hardened face.

Clu laughed at me again. I forced myself to open my eyes, to look into his face, which was slowly becoming clearer.

He looked exactly how I remembered; just a version of Flynn, slightly aged from the one that I'd met for the first time in the old system. The resemblance was uncanny, but true. All of the familiar features were there: His chin, square and strong, his prominent nose, his eyes of pale and ( actually) impressive blue that didn't match his personality. His hair, stuck somewhere between light brown and blonde, was slicked back on his head. Flynn had never worn his in such a restrained fashion. Before Clu started to change, it was one of the only ways anyone could tell them apart sometimes.

I moved my arm to prop myself up, but he stopped me.

"Ah ah ah," he said, pulling a hand out from where they were folded behind his back to wave a finger at me, "you don't want to do that, Yori."

I wondered if he remembered me from the one time we had met, or if he just knew my name from digging around in my programming. Glaring, I decided to follow his advice, and instead reached the mobile arm behind me. I felt that there was a massive patch on my back, warm with energy. I had to admit, I was impressed by it. I had suffered no trivial amount of damage, but it was clearly working to heal me anyway. I hoped for the sake of dignity that it wasn't something Clu had designed, although I knew logically that it must have been. I also knew that he'd been doing some internal patching too, whether I welcomed his interference or not, before I'd rejected him . . . A lot of work, actually. My escape attempt must have impressed him.

Still, a diagnostic now told me that my personal firewall was up. No matter how helpful he was feeling, he would not be touching me again. I opened up a few security protocols too, reinforcing my defenses, hopefully, even for standby mode.

The pain had subsided enough that I was able to say something to him at last. It wasn't in the least bit nice, either.

I was pleased by what may have actually been surprise at my language in his eyes, but his sadistic closed lip smile silenced my moment of pride.

"You just get better and better," he said, and ran his eyes over the length of my body. If I could have moved up to even a sitting position, I would have smacked him. Instead, I resorted to crossing my arms over my chest defensively.

"You're a monster and a murderer," I said. He simply shook his head.

"No," he said, "no no. I'm a savior, Yori. A true and proper leader for this system. I'm going to make it perfect, you know."

Oh, how I wished I could move. Instead, I collected some power sludge in the back of my mouth and spat it up into his face.

"You're a glitch in this system," I hissed at him.

His gaze turned murderous.

"Fine," he said, "maybe you're going to be too much trouble after all. Rinz-" he began to call to one of his lackeys, probably to incarcerate or derezz me, but I cut him off.

"Going to_ rectify_ me, Clu? Like you did to Tron?" I snapped. By Rectify, of course, I meant kill.

I had to wonder where that nice program I had been was now. There was nothing left I could feel but raging pain, grief, and smoldering, white hot hatred. Nothing nice was left. Not for him. Not in that moment, anyway.

Deep within my code, however, I did understand something about Clu: that he was misguided and frustrated. He felt betrayed by his friend, his user, and all that he had faith in. He believed he'd been traded out by Flynn for the ISOs, and plenty of the other programs he worked for felt the same way. (Of course, most programs hadn't committed genocide to deal with that particular, glitchy emotion.)

I also knew that Clu had been given too much power, with too little guidance. He was relentless and capable, but he _wanted_ a user. He wanted Flynn's presence, his guidance, his approval. He was a lost program, lashing out with everything he had. Everything for Clu, however, was also everything in the grid itself.

Somehow though, remembering Tron, knowing as I looked into Clu's eyes that he had been the one who betrayed him, the one who struck him down, I hated him even for those things that I knew I pitied him for. . . and even the things I sympathized with.

Tron's name, however, seemed to have given him as much of a pause as it had given me. Something very, very wild crossed over his face.

"You're _Tron's_ Yori," he said, his voice too quiet, sinister and twisting in delight, "of _course._"

I glared at him, but I knew that there was probably that little crease of worry and confusion between my eyebrows, and that my lips had closed tight.

He threw his head back then, and laughed boisterously. It was a corrupted sound. Nothing about it was healthy.

He continued this for some time, and then leaned over me, his face inches from mine. I tried to push him away, but I had no strength. I shied my face way. His arm reached around me, and I cringed.

"Get away from me," I commanded, but my voice too high and tense to have any authority in it. His fingertips ran up my back, starting just above the patch. I shuddered.

"You slime," I said, and he chuckled. His hand moved for my disk. I tried to flop over onto my back, even knowing it would hurt, to keep him away, but I couldn't. I sent all my reserve power to my firewall.

Still, a strong and singular command of "off" flew across my eyes, and I collapsed into darkness again.

Before everything ceased to process, I thought I heard a strange, repetitive, thrumming sound in the distance, and Clu's voice in my ear. He said one word.

"Games."


	15. Rinzler

I was standing behind a pane of glass, distorted like liquid with a repulsive force field ideal for bouncing a disc off of. On the outside, there was the seemingly endless expanse of the arena floor; the green illumination of the lightcycle grid blurring from perfect, even squares into a churning sea behind the walls of my latest prison. A shimmering figure in black and orange was sending his voice out across the stadium, amplified to the point of excess.

I could hear everything he said as it echoed off of the thousands of spectators that surrounded me, but I didn't need to. I already knew exactly what that cowering, subversive, gridworm of a program was saying. Jarvis was making an enormous spectacle of me, flaunting my nature as an old system program as if that were somehow a bad thing . . . as if I was somehow lesser than the screaming masses that were waiting to watch my destruction for their own entertainment.

I knew I should be frightened. I knew I should have been praying in the name of the users for salvation. But I had gone cold. Maybe it was in self defense. Maybe it was from the ordeal of being locked into yet another holding cell for the last 90 milicycles while I healed, constantly on alert for Clu.

I think maybe, after he decided that the games were to be my fate, he had given up on repurposing or tampering with me. That didn't mean I wasn't afraid to go into standby, though, afraid of him doing something . . . else. I couldn't even name what exactly I had a fear of him doing, I just had a horrible sense of being in some kind of covert danger, without even the comfort of knowing what _had_ been done to me while I was shut down.

For all I knew, though, he hadn't touched me once. All of my diagnostics read normal; maybe he had just been toying with me. But that was even worse. I was trapped inside the doubts of my own programming.

Jarvis was talking about my opponent now, somebody called Rinzler. The crowd went absolutely berserk when he was introduced, and I was filled with a sense of finality. I was going to be killed by this mysterious program that inspired such passion from his fans. That much was being made very clear.

At least I was going to die fighting.

After we took down the MCP, Dumont had called me a warrior. I never understood how that word could possibly apply to me until that moment. As I faced off with the spectators to my demise from inside a cage of glass, it abruptly began to make sense.

Music began to play, arousing another volley of screams from the programs watching us. My glass prison began to lift off of the ground, moving higher and higher. I could look down through the floor and see it racing away from me. I fought off a sense of vertigo, and swallowed back a severe dislike of heights.

My prison swung through the air, transforming, and met with that of another combatant. The glass melted together, and there I was, facing off in this massive space against one other program; a program like nothing I had ever encountered.

He was poised at the back of the disc wars platform, resting on the balls of his feet with his knees bent, one hand on the floor, as if ready to spring on my and physically tear me apart piece by piece. He was dominated by black, but the circuitry I could see on him in that position was orange. He was more red than that of the Black Guard, though. It was as if his circuits had been stained with user blood.

There were two small streaks of circuitry on either side of his helmet, which was angular and curved all at once, pitch black and highly reflective. It was somehow more frightening than any face, no matter how sinister, could have ever been. Light seemed to hit that helmet and die there on its surface. From within the confines of it, the strange noise I thought I'd imagined before was rolling out to fill the space between us.

It was a deeply corrupted sound, a repeated click in a deep and mechanical register, absolutely guttural and seething. The sound seemed to be nothing but pure and raging aggression, seeping out of him and weighing down the air itself.

I was immobilized by his presence. I wasn't even afraid, necessarily, but completely awestruck by the sheer hostility that he radiated. I didn't have to see him to know that he was staring at me with a kind of bloodlust from beneath the impossible screen of his helmet.

Then, suddenly, his complete stillness (which was in itself disturbing) melted into a single, fluid motion of his right arm.

The arm, encased in armor as black as the rest of his uniform, only bore circuitry at the elbow, and across the middle finger, thumb, and forefinger.

Something inside of my code underwent some kind of seizure upon seeing that, and the signals that did process were so erratic and incomprehensible that at first I couldn't even understand _why_ this pattern bothered me. I just felt suddenly as if I'd been kicked solidly in the stomach.

Then it hit me: those circuits were identical to Tron's.

The strength drained out of me, and I had to fight to stay focused and standing.

_Why did he look like that?_

Rinzler pulled his disc from behind his back, and for a second he was frozen again, and the intensity of his growl increased, filling the platform till it seemed to drown out the crowd below that was chanting his name.

And then, so quickly I could hardly tell how he'd gotten there, he was airborne and leaping towards me, doing the unthinkable.

As he took flight, he pulled his disc apart into _two_ discs, a perfect matched set.

_Impossible._

Both discs engaged, his arms stretched wide as he turned head over heels through the air, he landed a terrifyingly short distance away from me.

Everything was a blur to me as I yanked my disc out from behind my back, barely in time to deflect his first throw. The force of repelling it knocked me over backwards into a sprawl on the floor, and I saw his second disc fly through the air where I had just been standing.

I flung my feet up into the air and sprang back onto them, disc at the ready, my own helmet now engaged.

The sight of him there, standing to his full and impressive height as he snatched his returning disc out of the air without so much as looking at it, paralyzed me where I stood.

Words began to echo through my head.

Imperfection. Rectify. Reprogram. Rinzler.

Repurpose.

I understood it then.

The pattern of his armor was exact. The tiny circles of light were there in two places at the angle of his hips. The two dashes of circuitry at his midriff, and two more tiny circles at chest level . . . they were all there, all perfect. So was the symbol below his throat, at the height of his broad chest. There, as a final confirmation, were four perfect little squares that formed an equally perfect T.

Those were Tron's circuits. Clu had not killed him at all, but used him as a grand experiment to take repurposing to an entirely new level.

He had originally been given the ability to repurpose so that no program would ever find him out of work, but he had corrupted that beautiful process; that gift from Flynn.

Standing before me was someone foreign and impossible, filled with hate but great in skill; someone who had once been the guardian of this entire system.

Rinzler.

I wished Clu had just killed me. I never should have seen this. Tears sprung from my eyes and I started to quake. It was too much.

Rinzler . . . was Tron.


	16. Truth

The sound that finally cuts through the silent void that has filled the room is that of shattering glass. It comes as the drink of one poor, shocked program across the room slips unheeded from her hand and comes crashing to the floor.

If anyone else ever knew, they had been gotten rid of by Clu a long time ago. Shaddox, Radi, and myself have been the only ones. Now, for the first time in a thousand cycles, the truth looms up in the air, and Clu's nature is somehow impossibly clear. Tron had been his friend. Tron had been their hero. Tron had been their protector . . .

He used to know the name of every program in the grid. He didn't always get to meet them, and he didn't always get a face to put to that name, but he learned the names all the same. And maybe his prime directive was to fight for the users, but the users didn't always need a warrior. The one thing he had never stopped protecting, the one directive most dear to him, had always been us. What he had really fought for was this system.

I can't look at their faces. I can't look at the horror and shock and regret in their eyes as they see behind the screen of rhetoric and idealism. I can't watch their faces as they understand. I can't watch, because I remember it too clearly. The knowing that broke me. Whoever I was before that moment is dead. This Yori, she's so much the same you'd never know. But something changed in that moment that I can neither name nor ever get back.

I hadn't understood evil . . . till that moment. If he had killed Tron, that would have been different. Tron would have rather died. But Clu couldn't stop. He twisted Tron, riddled him through with codes and upgrades and downloads and functions and commands until he lost everything that made him who he was. He became a drone for suppression, he who had fought for freedom. He became a murderer, he who had rescued so many of us. Clu's monstrosity had replaced unbreakable will with a dependence on command.

And he had loved it.

All of this understanding comes to the programs around me as they accept the truth. Murmurs begin to finally roll through the room, accusations of lies, but I close my eyes, and I wait, and finally, the silence returns.

They _know_ it's true. Anybody who ever saw Rinzler fight . . . and even those who didn't, deeply and innately, in the heart of their code, they all know now.

The secret is out.

When I open my eyes, I see the stranger. He has turned towards me completely, but his hood is still up and he is holding his cloak shut across his torso, his fingers balled up into the fabric. Tiny patches of circuitry at his knees finally reveal a clear and blinding white as his identifier. He is brilliant to look at.

The stranger is completely and utterly still. It's as if what I have just revealed has frozen him right there, right to his seat. It seems he will never move again. I can't explain it, but I hold his gaze despite the fact that I can't see his eyes, and I hope that he can see how much I wish he would.


	17. Meanings

I can't start talking again right away. The entire bar rests in quiet that somehow serves as solace, and all of us understanding together is enough to sustain us as we each become lost in our thoughts and memory files.

Finally, the quiet is broken by a sob. Then another. I have been staring down at the table, lost in the reverie of finally sharing my burden, and I look up to see that it is Ti who's crying. Her hands are clamped over her mouth and nose, and she's shaking as tears begin to run down her cheeks. Serax takes her in his arms, but seems confused.

I understand though. For me, this was always about Tron. But for her, the truth is about her faith in Clu. I'm about to reach out to her across the table when something amazing happens.

Mav, sweet faced and essentially a stranger to all of us, reaches out and puts his hand on her shoulder. Her enormous brown eyes look towards him, but she doesn't turn her head. The look in those eyes is pleading.

He just looks back at her for a nano, and says very gently:

"I know."


	18. Hope and Secrets

It's Greshim who speaks first as Ti begins to wipe her eyes.

"I heard a rumor," he says very slowly, "That there's a program . . . nobody knows who he is; who saved three people from being crushed by a chunk of broken code in alpha sector, eight or nine milicycles ago. It's said that he's done similar things before, too.

"And nobody ever reported Rinzler dead. What if he isn't? What if he made it?"

A wave of murmurs and whispers runs through the room. A male program at the far end of the bar raises his hand.

"It's not a rumor. I know one of those girls. But Rinzler, saving anyone?"

"Yeah," adds a female I don't know, "and, I mean, you're not suggesting . . . ? Nobody can override their own programming, right?"

The question hangs in the air. They all look to me for an answer.

". . . I," I say very carefully, trying not to mislead them, "really don't know. Rinzler was . . . complicated. But so was Tron. If there was ever a program in this system who could have done it, it would have been him. That much is true. But it doesn't mean that he actually did."

The murmurs rise up again in the wake of my answer, then turn into chatter, and then to exclamations. The noise fills up the room, pounding around us.

Radi slices through it.

"It can't be. There's no way he made it," she says flatly, "if he was on Clu's ship."

The murmurs die. I can feel their hope dying with them. That hope is conflicted. Rinzler is a horrible memory to these programs, and accepting him as a savior is a tall order regardless of who he used to be.

Still, in whatever twisted fashion, they _were_ hoping, and I can't let Radi kill it so easily. Not when I know the truth: That Rinzler was not on Rectifier when it was destroyed.

I know logically that I shouldn't say anything, but morally, I have to.

"He wasn't."

Radi jolts in her chair, glaring at me, her lip twisted up in a silent snarl. She doesn't have to say anything. I know what she's thinking. I simply shake my head at her.

"I _know_ he wasn't."

I look away from her. We aren't discussing this right now.

In fact, I look away from all of them. I have to, because I do wish that I _could_ tell them how I know what I do. I do wish that I could give them certainty. But this is one secret that needs to be kept, because it is one story that isn't over.

A few more voices take into the air again, filling it with hopeful speculation.

Then, for a single, terrifying, but beautiful second, I think I hear a joyful, familiar growl humming softly beneath the chatter.

And then, like a flash of energy in the clouds above, it is gone.

It's time for the story to continue.


	19. Disc Wars

A moment after I realized who I was looking at, I lost control.

"NO!"

I screamed as if I were dying. My arms stiffened, and I stumbled back blindly. My disc was whirring, and my circuitry blinked erratically as my programming fizzled into a confused mix of signals that shut each other down as they conflicted inside me.

Completely forgetting where I was and how very likely I was to be derezzed in a moment, I wheeled around so that I was looking out the side of my glass prison that faced were Clu's transport had pulled in to observe.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?" I shrieked, knowing he couldn't hear me but unable to stop, "CLU! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIM? Wha-" I was cut off by the sound of my own gasp as a disc came shirring past my stomach. I dropped to the ground as the calculated shot came back to where I'd been, and sprung up again.

Rinzler made that horrific noise again. It was like a glitching engine, dark and heavy. He was clearly not entertained by my evasive maneuvering and unstable behavior.

I stared at him for a long moment, and then hurled my disc with every ounce of force I had in my body towards his feet.

"NO," I screamed again, the sound now harsh and broken and quiet as my throat struggled to repair itself from my last round of screeching. Rinzler jumped back from my skidding disc, which disengaged and came to a harmless stop at his feet.

He snarled, and catapulted into the air, flipping over me and coming down behind me.

I cried out as I threw my arms up to block his first swipe, and ducked to miss his second. His precision was . . . stunning. As I came back up, I met his disc with my shoulder, and I flinched back.

He was toying with me. Instead of derezzing me and getting it over with, he was taking quick, calculated stabs at me, nicking little fragments of data from my body and listening to my cries and grunts.

I turned and ran back a few steps, then looked back to see both of his discs flying off in opposite directions from his hands. I looked at where he stood, and made a calculation.

I jumped, pulling my knees almost up to my chin, at the exact moment when they bounced back. I saw the discs pass under me, crossing each other's paths one over the other. It would, without question, have been a magnificent derezz for the viewers below.

Both discs, which I noticed were orange in the center but white on their edges, hit the walls a second time and ricocheted towards him. He snatched them both from their flight with an exacting and identical motion of each arm. He didn't even give it a thought.

I had the calculation capabilities to anticipate his moves forever, but I didn't have the physical upgrades to sustain this, nor the power. I was tiring quickly, and he was, frankly, amazing.

Desperation was the only solution.

"I said _No,"_ I panted, and dove.

Both his discs cut little slashes into my sides, but what hurt more was actually the solidity of his body as I hit it.

We both came crashing down, my arms wrapped around his waist, and I heard a hissing sound, and his discs clattered to the ground as he tried to push me away.

I locked my fingers under the shoulder guards of his armor, though, and clung to him, refusing to let go.

We rolled, locked together.

He was looming over me, the sound of him ringing in my ears, when an old upgrade suddenly kicked in.

I bent my head so that the solid place where my visor met my helmet was lined up with the center of his forehead above me. I calculated my trajectory, and dug my fingers into him, yanking him down to me as best I could.

At the same moment, I lunged upward with my entire torso, and smashed my head into his with so much force that the impact shattered my entire helmet, hood and all.

Rinzler's body went limp.

The headbutt maneuver left me reeling. My vision was pixilated and blurred. I was so disoriented, in fact, that for a moment I couldn't even remember my own name. Unable to process, I simply fell back and stayed there, totally immobilized, the full but familiar weight of his body resting on top of me.

The multitude bellow was booing, the sound ringing in my ears and making my head pound. They didn't much appreciate this User style fighting, a special gift to me courtesy of Flynn's upgrades.

In my blurry state, suddenly, the memory of the day I received that particular upgrade unfolded before me, clear as glass.

There was Tron, worrying that I still didn't have enough defensive and combative skills to be safe in the colonies by myself. Then there was me, rolling my eyes and complaining, and there was Flynn, laughing heartily at Tron's worried face. It was a happy memory.

"Look, Tron," He had said, "I'll give her a few user tricks. How about that? She'll be the only one in the system who has them. No flips or trick, no physical changes, just a few techniques."

The he had turned to me.

"Yori, what' do you think?"

I was remembering how I had smiled at him, still dazed and lost from the headbutt, as someone's hands wrapped around my arms, lifted me up, and dragged me away.


	20. Better than Him

Clarity returned to me, and I found that the hands that held me were those of two guards, dragging me behind them with my heels dragging the floor. I kicked ferociously till they let me stand on my own.

They kept their hands clamped onto me, though, walking slightly behind me and holding my arms behind my back.

They steered me into an elevator that was set back into the sea of seemingly endless stadium seating, and the door hissed shut behind us.

A sound from behind me informed me, before the guards had even turned me around to face the doors again, that Rinzler had regained consciousness and had also joined our little party. When they did turn me, I found myself to be unnervingly close to him in the small space, eye level with the place on the back of his neck where his uniform ended and his helmet began.

His posture indicated nothing about whether he was aware of me. He held his hands slightly out to either side, and though his fists weren't clenched, there was something very rigid in how he held his fingers. The shoulders I now had such ample opportunity to examine were slightly hunched, and his head was bent ever so slightly. Everything about him seemed automatic, as if he'd just been set there in ready position to do whatever it was that was required of him; in this case, to exit the elevator. In all likelihood, he'd turned around and locked into this latest pose before the doors had even shut in the first place.

He was simply impossible. No program was ever intentionally written to be so unerringly mechanical. It was devastating to watch, and for that matter, out rightly painful. He didn't even strike me so much as a program as he did an animal (insofar as I understand the concept of animals, that is,) and that noise he made only added to the impression.

We were whisked upward as I stared wide eyed at his back, and a moment later the doors were whisking open again. Rinzler strode out so quickly that he was almost in sync with their motion, and moved far ahead of us to pass through another door. There was something strange in how he moved, like each step contained the potential to transform into a calculated lunge at any moment; but the gait also retained some semblance of Tron's familiar, direct way of moving. . . Just watching him walk was perversely fascinating, if deeply horrific.

We stepped down from the elevator into the hall, filled completely with the heated glow of orange circuits, and I realized that we must be aboard the transport from which Clu viewed the games.

The door in front of us slid open, and we found ourselves in the ships central viewing area.

Rinzler had already crossed the room to stand quietly beside Clu, who was lounging in a heavy, swiveling black chair at the room's center. His warning-sign yellow circuits were noticeably incongruent with the orange that penetrated every other corner of the room, as well as with the predominantly blue arena that was visible through the window behind him.

His helmet stood between me and his expression. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to see it.

"You're disrupting my system, program," he said, his voice distorted by his helmet but powerful all the same.

"Good," I replied evenly, holding myself up to my full height and staring him down without fear, feeling empowered despite how tattered and damaged I probably looked from my repeated bouts with Rinzler's discs. I had no fear left, though. After what he had shown me, after what he had made me endure, what else could he do that was worse?

His helmet retracted. His face was alarmingly calm.

"To her knees," he said, and the guards forced me to the ground. I glared back up at him, knowing that this was the end of me, but somehow unable to care. Dying by Clu's hand was certainly preferable to living by it.

But he didn't move.

"Rinzler," he said casually, but with a twist of brutal pleasure moving across his features, "finish the game."

Rinzler reached behind his head, and withdrew his disc.

For a moment, it didn't seem real. Then, the stupidity of it all hit me full force. Clu would _never_ be bothered to kill someone like me, who he considered to be entirely undesirable and beneath him. Especially not when having Rinzler do it gave him yet another chance to twist the blade into whatever might be left of Tron. He was going to make Rinzler execute me, without even the pretext of combat, and I was a fool for expecting otherwise.

I had already accepted deresolution . . . but this? This had to be stopped. Not for me, but for Tron.

"Don't do this," I said, my voice shaking as I looked up into the abyss of black that was Rinzler's helmet, "this isn't who you are."

He took another step towards me, slinking across the space between us, making that noise very, very softly beneath his helmet. I just hoped his slow progress was because of doubt, and not pre-programmed sadism.

"Tron," I said, my voice rising, "that's who you are. You fight for the users, not Clu. Not. Clu."

He gave his discs an absent twist, dividing them, raising them, and activating them all in the same liquid gesture.

"Tron," I said again, my voice escalating, now officially pleading with him, "please, don't do this."

He was unwavering.

"Please! Tron! It's me, Yori! We were in love, remember?We were in _love!_"

He lowered his discs to the level of my neck, right about that of his hips, and crossed one arm over the other. I could see how he would do it. He would place one disc on the either side of my neck, and then suddenly draw his arms out. One, swift, exactly slice, and I would be pixels on the floor, then energy in the air, and then nothing at all.

"TRON!" I was truly desperate now, screaming at him, my voice distraught even to my own ears, "don't let him do this to you! Do not let him make you a monster! TRON!"

He had drawn himself up to me by now, and I could feel the heat of the friction coming off of those discs as they whirred to either side of my neck.

He looked down at me, and met my wide and wild eyes.

"Please, no! Tron, YOU'RE BETTER THAN HIM!" I wailed the final words even as he tensed, energy rippling through him as he prepared for the final strike. That noise was rolling out of him like thunder.

Then, suddenly, he stopped. Everything stopped. The growling disappeared, and even the humming of the discs cut out as they deactivated. Silence so profound it seemed tangible was all that filled the room.

Rinzler lowered his head down to my level. His helmet was inches away from me, shining and awesomely terrifying, and his hands moved away from my neck as he stared me down. I wished I knew what he was calculating under that helmet, behind those blue eyes that I couldn't see.

He stood up abruptly, clicking his discs back into one, and turned with simultaneous grace and rigidity towards Clu. The look on his master's face was monstrous.

"What are you doing," Clu hissed. It wasn't even a question so much a threat, masked with the same wording as a question.

Rinzler ducked his head, and placed his disc behind him once again. He resumed his position of perfect obedience, and floored everyone in the room by saying the one word I would ever hear out of him.

"Different."

I shivered. His voice was terrible. It had the same deep register and rough way of speaking than I knew from Tron, but it fizzled with ferocity and aggression, and was somehow twisted from lack of use. It was if he was snarling without meaning to.

Clu just . . . stared at him for a nano.

And then, he did something that disturbed me more than anything. He smiled a perfectly even, and natural, closed lip smile.

"Yori," he said through his teeth, barely opening his lips, "You're corrupting my best program."

I didn't have anything to say to him. I was absolutely speechless.

His face suddenly came alive.

"Bring me her disc," he said, and the gravity in his voice, and the way he slyly glanced at Rinzler as he gave the command, told me that I would very shortly be wishing that Rinzler had killed me after all.

* * *

Author's note:

Chapter 20, woooo! Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who has read this far. I'm having such a great time writing this, and it's even better knowing that other people are enjoying it also.

Even MORE thanks to those of you who have been reviewing, especially to sharinganavenger, who's taken the time to write reveiws SO detailed that they're longer than some of my updates!

ONE MORE THING: As a treat for myself (and all of you who might be interested in my take on Tronzler's messed up mind,) I now have a new story up, titled "Different." It's Rinzler's perspective on the disc battle (if you could call it that. . . ) from chapter 19, just a chapter long.

Again, thanks to all of you. XD

End of line.

PS: I also did a tiny bit of editing and tweaking on chapter 18, just in case anybody is interested.


	21. Resistance

I remember screaming. I remember pain. I remember the way the foreign code and the powerful overrides felt as they scorched my system. I remember being awake for the entire process, filled with that unrelenting agony. I remember being held there in that sterile room they brought me to, a slave to the disc on my back through which Clu accessed everything that made me who I am. I remember Rinzler, watching, silent and still, left there by his master in order to remind me of what I was to become; immune to what he was witnessing.

Clu told me over and over not to resist. He would his fingers through my hair, pulling it loose, and tell me that I was only making it worse for myself. My struggles only increased. The pain did too.

And then I would scream some more. I didn't have the physical strength to both resist and be silent.

Usually, I would shout my name and purpose, creating a mantra to fend off his lies. But as my future grew darker, I began shouting other things. I would tell myself stories between groans and gasps; stories of my work for Lora, and of the old system. Stories of the early days of the grid, and of Tron.

But the overrides, they were just like what the MCP had used. It hurt while they were installed, however long that took, and then you felt nothing. You found yourself brainwashed, able to perform anything besides your basic functions, as required, when ordered.

Clu was making me into a shadow of myself, just a Yori shaped mass of code. No thought. No real emotions. Just data.

Just a drone.

I remember the way my circuits flashed; the way blue looked just before it turned to orange. And then the memories stop, and there's nothing for a long, long while.


	22. Repurposed

There was something very familiar about the way that I lived. As if at some point in my life, at some point a very long way in the past, that is, I had experienced something very much like it.

Then, it seemed, there must have been some change. I must have done something else. I knew this because the memories would stop, and turn to blurs and pixels that held no meaning.

To want to see those memories was very dangerous. They would bring faults with their coming.

I _must_ have been living in a manner that was imperfect. After all, why else would I forgotten? I did not pursue the lost files.

My life was _quite_ perfect, anyway.

It was organized, it was neat. I worked without stop. I was given power when I was tired. Then I worked some more.

I was busy, productive, perfect.

Clu was pleased.


	23. Fear and Complexity

The looks on their faces are indescribable. Their emotions form expressions that are caught somewhere between shock, horror, joy, betrayal, and enlightenment all at once. It's no wonder to me, either.

The shock is because I had seemed so normal to them, and they are surprised by the fact that anyone who underwent Clu's tampering could _ever_ qualify as normal.

The horror comes in varying degrees, some on my behalf because of what Clu did, some on account of what they assume I must have done as his servant.

The joy goes hand in hand with the enlightened looks. I know that many of them are thinking about others they knew who had been repurposed, and of Tron, and thinking seriously about what this could mean for them. After all, I have just proven that repurposing, at least in a mild form, can be undone. And while I can't say that my experience was anything but exceptional, I know as they do that it's worth considering anyway. . . That is, the fact that miracles still happen in this place is worth considering.

Miracles. It's such profound concept, like the idea of users used to be before Flynn. While he didn't take the value of our own creators away from us (that is, not for those of us like Tron and I who _had_ other creators,) he certainly changed how we perceived them. Flynn was more like royalty than a deity to many programs, whatever they may have called him. The grace associated with our creators has been taken away.

I like that idea though, the idea of miracles. It's been absent from this system for too long.

I catch myself looking at the stranger again as I think this. Funny, how I've named him that, as if he's somehow too significant to be grouped with the other patrons.

Actually, I _know_ that he is. The real problem is that I don't know _why._

. . . At least, that's what I'm telling myself. Self preservation can manifest as denial, after all, so maybe I do know why; and simply can't make myself admit it because of all the ramifications that will come hand in hand with the truth.

It's so dangerous, to hope for a miracle. And what I'm thinking . . . well, wouldn't "miracle" be the only way to describe it if it _were_ true? That is, if the stranger really is _him_, sitting there at this bar, at this moment, after all this time?

Through this entire process of telling my tale, that idea has been building inside me, and now it's finally a solid question: _Could he be . . .?_

Now that I'm thinking about it, I can't stop. The pieces all fit too well: the structure of his mouth and nose, the missing disc, the way he purposefully hides the natural pattern of his circuits, as if he knows that programs will recognize them, but isn't comfortable being identified.

No. It's too much, too good to be true. I tell myself that even as I'm staring at him.

If I choose to believe this, and I'm wrong . . . I don't know what it will do to me, really. A thousand cycles of fighting and hiding and watching as Clu corrupted the world that I love have taken their toll. I can't handle the pain of disappointment anymore. At least not in regards to Tron.

That is why I can't allow myself to say anything about him right now, not with any certainty.

Besides, even if I do choose to believe what I so badly wish to be true, there'd be so much else that would come to weigh on me as a result:

To begin with, I wouldn't know who he was, or what to call him. Would he be Rinzler, but unclouded by Clu? Or Tron, finally without Rinzler? Or some combination of both? Are any of those even possible?

The fact is that, even if he _is_ Tron, it doesn't mean that he's still the Tron that I fell in love with. That idea by itself weighs heavily on my mind, and doesn't even begin to include the questions regarding his guilt for Rinzler's actions (which give me endless headaches already), or the question of how the changes in me would sit with him.

There's a complexity present now that was never there before, basically, and it's far, far too much.

_You're just caught up in the story,_ I tell myself, _he's just a program, albeit a very intriguing one who reminds you of Tron. That's all this is._

I tell myself this over and over for while, until finally, it is all I believe again. He's just the stranger; mysterious, but nothing more. Nothing special.

Just a stranger: plain, nice, and simple.


	24. An Unexpected Savior

Sometimes, when people talk about Rinzler, (if they talk about him at all, that is,) I feel like I'm the only one among them who wonders about the potential that he had. Between his past, the updates and downloads that had Clu gave him to enhance his already unmatched abilities as a warrior, and the raw determination that he had always possessed, I've always been forced to wonder about how much may have been going on inside of that helmet.

What Rinzler was, or perhaps is, is so impossibly complicated; because was a persona invoked from the darkest, most basic, most carnal parts of Tron's code. And yes, Tron had darker aspects. After all, none of us are perfect. How could we be, when we were created by equally imperfect beings like Kevin Flynn? Tron was no exception. He had always possessed controversial traits that made an absolutely ideal core for what Rinzler would become.

To begin with, Tron was dogged to the point of being aggressive towards his cause, if not to other programs. His ability to stop himself once he had committed to something was minimal, to say the least. He was also a deeply private individual who often tended to keep things to himself until the situation literally forced him to share . . . and this type of reserve also applied to him emotionally.

Though a deeply feeling program who believed devoutly in the value of life, he had a unique ability to harden himself to the things he faced, allowing him to pursue any give initiative to its end, regardless of moral question. It's why he survived the games in the old system, and in the new. Regardless of the pain it caused him to take a life, he could do it if he believed it to be in line with his higher purpose, whether that was to return to his users service, to defeat the MCP, to protect this system or, eventually, to serve Clu as Rinzler.

In some ways, though, those traits were also his most redeeming.

Tron was absolutely devout. The passion with which he pursued his aforementioned causes had always stemmed from a sense of purpose the likes of which I have never truly witnessed in anyone else, a sense that allowed for the means to be considerably less important to him than the ends. Tron was impossibly flexible.

This wasn't from any moral lacking; it was simply that the rigidity of the standards regarding what he could and could not do was absolutely minimal. He was created to watchdog a system, to protect it and its users, a function so broad that there were virtually no parameters regarding _how_ he did it. Not like me, for example.

Since I'm a utility program, virtually everything useful that I do is limited to what can be accomplished by crunching and manipulating existing data, just as everything that an application program does is confined to whatever application it is that they're running in the first place. Sure, a chess program can manipulate the pieces on the board, but it can't manipulate the rules of the game itself. That's how it is for programs. These types of limitations are something that our working lives are built around naturally.

Tron, though, was simply supposed to protect the system, and was therefore unique because he could do essentially anything that he needed to so long as it was ultimately beneficial.

His natural reserve, too, was an asset. He had the ability to remove the emotion form a situation, or at least to move past it, and that allowed him to make seemingly impossible decisions. And each and every one of those choices was made with the sole purpose of benefitting all of us in the long run, regardless of what he would have to endure in the present.

. . . Which brings me to my point.

Rinzler, as a repurpose, was not a program in and of himself. As I've said already, he was made up, at least at his most basic level, of pieces of Tron. And while Clu had aimed to build him from only the most aggressive, most dangerous aspects of Tron when he did this, he had accidently tapped into the exact traits that made had made him so superior in the first place.

And that is why, despite all odds, _Rinzler_ is the one who saved me. Rinzler is the one who brought me back.


	25. In Rinzler's Hands

I was at my control panel, standing in the same place I always stood, doing the same thing that I always did.

The only thing that was different was the stillness in the room. I was alone. While it wasn't completely unheard of for me to be the only one working, (I was _always _working, prototyping as is my basic function,) this time there seemed to be something peculiar about the solitude and the warm silence that surrounded me. Something about it seemed almost significant.

I was lost in it, all of it: The simplicity of my own mind -so limited to what was in front of me because of Clu's handiwork- and the quiet, the satisfaction of work, and the loneliness that somehow, distantly, hurt me. Even a repurposed Yori, incapable of anything but work, knew that someone was missing.

My reverie was broken suddenly as the door opened behind me. Its quiet hiss disrupted my wholesome silence, and I looked up to see who was responsible.

It was Rinzler.

He served a variety of functions for Clu, but that he would be checking on me was, to say the least, unusual. He had been in before of course, he went everywhere, but he was always either acting as the vanguard for Clu's arrival, or trailing behind him. The fact that he was alone now was the strangest part.

What was not unusual, however, was the discomforting focus with which he watched me. That, regardless of his purpose, had always been consistent. Something about me perturbed him, for reasons I was never entirely certain he understood. In fact, I think that in itself was a part of the reasoning. At the time, though, I didn't have the capacity for such considerations. I was otherwise occupied by the typical, mind-numbing state of terror that his presence always inflicted on me. Clu had been very careful to keep that response intact.

"Sir?" I said, "may I help you?" I was improvising somewhat with the title. Nobody ever seemed to address him directly besides Clu, and if he had any kind of rational, formal title, I'd never heard it. He was just . . . there. There to be feared. To enforce. To observe. Not to be talked to.

Besides, Rinzler didn't speak anyway. I waited instead for a physical response from him, maybe that strange noise that he made when he was irritated or restless, (which, at least lately, was most of the time.) But he didn't move, nor make a sound. He simply watched me, and I stood there, unable to even blink out of fear.

Then, suddenly, he crossed the room. He strode with more purpose, more directness of movement, than I had ever seen from him. In an instant, he was there, inches away from me, looming over my head.

I backed frantically into my control panel, my fingers clamping onto its edge as if somehow it could save me from whatever it was that he was going to do. He shadowed me, using one perfect, graceful movement to match my own, never wavering an inch in his distance from me. I looked up into the awesome blackness of his helmet, sensing his scrutiny, the heat of his gaze. A shiver ran through me, a pulse of cold energy shooting through my circuits. I was holding my breath. I was utterly frozen.

And still he didn't move, didn't touch me, didn't make a sound. He simply watched, as if by sheer force of will he could make me do something. . . whatever that something was. I had the overwhelming sense that I was disappointing him, somehow.

I assumed it had to be related to work. That was, after all, the only thing that I did. It took me another nano, however, before I was finally able to choke up the words.

"Di-did y-you need to review my work, sir?"

This had the exact opposite of my intended effect. He snapped, flying forward into a kind of crouch, his hands taking up a grip of their own on my panel as he leaned into me. His helmet was perfectly level with my face now, and so close that the end of my nose was at serious risk of making contact with its cold surface. He was looking me dead in the eye, ( I could feel it,) and that noise was rolling out of him with uncontrolled fury. It throbbed in my ears, beating the air and rumbling in his chest. I could almost feel the vibrations. There was something in it I hadn't heard before. It wasn't the bloodlust or satisfaction of battle; and it wasn't the sound of his restlessness, or the dull seeping out of his innate aggression. This was direct, intentional. Like he was trying to tell me something . . .

I understood, suddenly. He was infuriated with me; infuriated with my simple mind, my endless working. He despised my response, and he wanted me to know that it was wrong. I just didn't understand why.

He snarled a moment longer, but then he did something else, even stranger than anything I'd seen so far.

A ripple of energy burst through him, more like a shock than a shiver, and the noise he was making cut out, abruptly and roughly. It was like it had been strangled out of him. His head jerked down, and to this left, and he seemed frozen there for a moment. And then he shook his head violently, as if he was desperately trying to dispel whatever was going on inside of it. Whatever he was battling was internal, but clearly hurting him. Actually, this was a program who never so much as changed his posture, so "hurting" cannot begin to explain the kind of agony he must have been experiencing in that moment. It was causing me pain just to watch.

Slowly, though, he flexed his shoulders, and lifted his head, pulling it back. His hands still seemed locked to the panel next to mine. His head rolled around on his neck till he was facing me again, chest heaving. I found myself looking dead center at his helmet once again with my fixated, terrified eyes.

Then, as if nothing had happened, he unlocked his grip, and stood up straight, abnormally straight for him, really. Still, he didn't move away from me.

Instead, he drew himself, somehow, closer, and reached up. His movement was forceful and direct, and I suspected he was battling himself to manage even this small motion. I couldn't comprehend why, though; but then, he put his hands on either side of my face.

My mind became instantly and entirely blank. I could perceive nothing outside of those hands. They were big, his palms cradling what seemed to be the whole of my jaw, but they were also fantastically gentle. His thumbs rested against my cheeks, the fabric of his uniform smooth against my skin. I could also feel his fingers pressing gently into my neck. They'd found their way under my hair, all the way to skin and fabric. I could feel the tension that was coursing through him from the constant, even force of his grip. He was trying to convey something very forceful. But he was also being remarkably delicate. The combination was instantly powerful; I hadn't been this aware of any one sensation in a long, long, time. And yet, with one touch it was all rushing back, more vivid and beautiful than I could ever have imagined it would be.

I closed my eyes, lost in the feeling, but a quick, sharp motion; a tightening and then loosening in his grip, made me open them again. I couldn't see his eyes, but I could feel them. They were determined, passionately and relentlessly seeking something in my own gaze. He emitted a low sound.

It wasn't the growl of before. Instead, it was . . . soft. It was somehow more vocal, less animal. It wasn't really pleased, exactly, but it was at least resigned. It was really more of a purr, steady and warm, than a growl .

Thing started to change inside of me as he held me there. Seemingly natural urges to work and calculate suddenly seemed weird and excessive. Memory files began to open up and search and repair functions began self activating and running amuck in my internal system. For a moment, I felt weak. But then, it was gone. I felt clean, clarity lighting up my mind for the first time since Clu had first touched my disk. A progress bar popped up and told me that broken code was being deleted, and a moment later, it was all over.

I was me again. I was Yori.

His hands slipped from my face, and he watched me a moment longer in silence before he turned on his heel and swept towards the door. I sprinted after him.

"Wait," I said, and as I reached out for him I realized that my circuits had returned to blue. The orange had been nothing but a self inflicted mask all along.

He let me put my hand on his broad shoulder as he drew to a halt, but I could sense already that he had accomplished his goal, and that my time with this (by his usual standards) irrational form of Rinzler was coming to a close. I dropped my hand though, and looked up steadily at the helmet that shielded his face from me. I was glad that he kept it there, keeping Tron's face separated from the being that he'd become.

"Thank you," I said, and I put my fingertips against the T on his chest for just an instant. In a way, I was addressing Tron with the gesture, wherever he was inside of that mass of corrupted code that had created Rinzler.

As I lowered my hand again, though, he moved in that fluid, impossibly fast way to take both of my hands in his, instead. His grip was a little uncomfortable, but not threatening.

Not entirely sure why, I bent my elbow, and lifted his hand up to my face. Hesitantly, gently, for an immeasurable moment, I pressed my lips against it. The circuits of his fingers melted into blue.

I slipped my hand from his grip then, and turned to go. I knew that this was my only chance at escape, and that my time was running out. Still, I was saddened. For one tiny fragment of a moment, I had sensed in him everything that had made me love Tron, and I wished that I could have stayed.

I looked longingly over my shoulder as the door shut behind me, just to get one final look at him. I saw that he was standing there, frozen, staring silently and fixatedly at his blue-lit hand.

And then the door was there between us, and I was sprinting away.

He had left a baton in my hand.

I was finally free.

* * *

Author's note: As I did for chapter 19 with "Different," I wanted to tell this chapter from Rinzler's point of view. If anybody is interested, "Perfect" is now up on my author's page. As always, your critique in encouraged! I do take it seriously, and you DO help me make these stories better by reviewing!

Thanks again for reading!

End of line.


	26. The Answer is Always

"I was picked up by Shaddox and Radi soon after I escaped. I'd learned to mask my circuits in neutral white, but they recognized the pattern. They had seen my somewhat infamous round of disc wars, and had remembered me for it despite the passage of time. All told, I'd spent nearly a quarter cycle in Clu's service.

"At first, I'd wanted them both to leave me alone," Radi comes close to smiling as I mention this, "but then Shaddox brought up Tron. He said he knew who I was, and why Rinzler had spared me, calling me 'Tron's Yori.' I tried to deck him for it, largely because that was the kind of temper my experiences had left me with, but he caught my hand. While I glared at him, he explained, finally, who he was. I recognized the name; Shaddox had been one of Tron's few truly close friends.

"Obviosly, they convinced me eventually. I've been constructing all manner of deceptive accessories ever since. Well, until very recently. Since Clu fell, I've essentially done whatever's been needed of me. Who knew," I almost laughed, "that I could be so diverse?"

They all smile at this, but the room is becoming pleasantly quiet. After awhile, a voice breaks it.

"Is that the end, then?" asks Ti. I nod.

"For the moment."

She nods, but looks sad, her chin ducking down to her chest.

"What about Tron?" she murmurs.

I can't answer her right way.

Nobody realized, while I was describing what occurred between Rinzler and I, that the way I was shaking was not from old emotions. Nobody noticed how I had fixated on the stranger at the bar. Nobody else has grasped what I have been denying since I'd sat down.

I don't think he had realized he was doing it. I think, for the moment, he had simply been as lost in the memory as I was. But he gave himself away, and really, that's all that matters.

He had done it as I spoke. Just before I told them how I had kissed Rinzler's hand, h had lifted his own up from his lap, and stared at its profoundly, impossibly, familiar circuits.

He remembered.

It was him.

It had always been, and could only be _him._ The stranger with the blinding circuits . . . _is_ Tron.

We both know now that I know who he is. I can feel it in the air between us. He knew as soon as I reacted. He knew from the way my voice came to a choking halt, the way I froze in place and couldn't form words. He knew from the way my fist had clenched shut, as if I could still feel his hand beneath my fingers.

He knew also because of how I had tried to hide my reaction from the others. He could see that I understood: He needs to stay a secret. He has to, because he can't afford to disappoint them or hurt them again, and he has no back up. No way to preserve the change he's undergone. He doesn't have his disc . . .

"What about him?" I reply finally, yanking my gaze back to her face and tucking my hands under the table so she can't see the way that the excitement, joy, terror, and tears struggling inside of me are making them shake.

Another voice speaks. It stops her answer, gliding through the room to meet me.

"Could you forgive him?"

His voice is so much like how I remember, but tired now. Worn. It's still low, and rough, but more broken now with age. And yet, it retains its warmth and its intensity, and I am filled with impossible joy upon hearing it. It retains that same, familiar Tron tone: quick, efficient, nearly severe. I can read the conflict in it, too; the yearning, the shame, the relief, the trepidation, the memory of everything that he has done, and the determination to know once and for all what is going to happen to us.

"It's not that simple," I say gently. My voice is soft, meant only for him. He waits.

"But," I continue, looking into the shadow under his hood that hides his eyes, "if you're asking me if I would still _love_ him," the tension between us is almost painful, and I have to fight to keep my voice from breaking, to keep the tears from falling. The faces in the room flick confusedly from me to him, most of them seeming to just now be realizing that there's someone sitting there. They're confused. They can feel the tension, but can't understand the reason for the rawness in the air.

Then, he raises his head just a little, and I can finally see his eyes, and suddenly I can speak. the words are effortless.

"The answer is yes," I promise him.

"The answer will always be yes."

The tension evaporates. Whatever complications now lay ahead of us mean nothing. Our time apart has ended, finally, with that single statement, and now, all I can see is him. It's as if he's the only other person in the room. I hardly notice as the others say their goodbyes, as they file out in groups of twos and threes. They go away, but I'll be seeing them again, and it is right that they should go.

Their part of this story is over.


	27. Reunion

I want to stand up, to cross the brief expanse of the open floor, to move to his side. I want to take his hand, or rip the hood away from his face, and throw my arms around him; but I can't. I've gone into a kind of system-wide shock, and I can't bring myself to do anything but look at him. It's been so long since he's been himself, since I truly believed that he was alive, that a part of me still worries that maybe I'm just glitching.

Tron has always been stronger than I have. It shows now, as he stands, and makes his way towards me. The caged-animal way of moving that was so distinctive of Rinzler is gone. The long strides, the strength of Tron, that's all that I see anymore. People notice him when he moves; the authority he emits is palpable, even if he doesn't trust it himself.

I do, however, notice a different carriage in his shoulders, not thrown back, but tightened down. I can't help but realize that, if Tron was always a part of Rinzler, Rinzler will now always be a part of Tron. Obedience, aggression, and an emotional immunity made Rinzler what he was, and the potential to be controlled by these traits is now something that Tron will have to defy for the remainder of his life.

Of course, if he could back himself up, if he had an untainted disc, then that would be so much easier. . . I have to stop this train of thought before I overload, telling myself that all good things will happen in time. Based on what I'm seeing in front of me, I happen to know exactly how true that really is.

When he reaches me, all I can do is make a sweeping motion with my hand, indicating that he should sit down, but he doesn't. Instead he looks around the room, assessing how much attention we have drawn to ourselves already. I follow his lead, and realize that, while our audience is limited, there are still, in fact, programs watching us. They seem to be waiting to see if the he can lead another story out of me. They assume I don't know him, assuming he's a stranger with a question.

His hand opens up in front of me and he looks down. Very slowly, I allow myself to take it. It's been so long, I can hardly stand how it feels. It seems impossible, but it isn't. It's his hand, no longer familiar, but not forgotten. I look down at his circuits, and shake my head. I'm thinking about how it was their pattern that first told me that he wasn't dead, how in that moment I had almost wished that he was. If I had known then what I know now about Rinzler, though . . .

His other hand comes up, his fingertips sliding under my chin and lifting my face up to his. At this distance, his hood is no match for me. I can see his face for the first time.

Most of the color has faded out of it, it seems, after a thousand cycles trapped under Rinzler's helmet. Despite his ghostly complexion, however, there's a look of relief that paints his every feature, is if he's been enduring a long nightmare, and has just woken up. In the depths of his eyes, the same dark, clear blue that I remember, I can see how tired he is; how sickened he is with himself, and yet how determined he is. Rinzler's memories weigh heavily on his system, but he has chosen some kind of redemption.

Whatever else I see in his features, though, doesn't compare to the expression as a whole. It's so impossibly familiar; it was as if he's never been gone. It's that look of consternation he's always worn more often than any other look, his eyebrows pulled in, his mouth set into a very small, hard line. I nearly laugh, partially out of relief, mostly because it is just so . . . _Tron._

I drop his hand, and put my fingertips against the T on his chest, sensing the energy that pulses inside the center square beneath my hand.

"It's really you," I whisper, and his face softens. The eyebrows relax, and his eyes crinkle at their corners as he smiles. It's a slight smile, barely revealing the white glimmer of his teeth, but so warm.

He shakes his head, and takes my hand again so that mine and his are now entwined and resting together against him.

"Yori," he says, and that's enough. My eyes, surely, are lighting up.

"Come with me," I tell him suddenly, and begin to pull him towards the door.


	28. Surprises

The déjà vu of our actions is overwhelming, but at the same time, brings me immense pleasure. It's as if we're beginning anew, as if we can take everything between us and make it secondary to a fresh life that begins now. By reliving the past, it's as if we're giving ourselves an opportunity to do it over again.

Although, it _will_ be different this time.

The circumstances have changed. This is not the Encom system. Even the force field that I pass through when the door opens is different. It acts as a screen, just as the one over my window does. From the outside, this place, about a block from Flynn's arcade, looks cold and empty. I don't have to shut off the patterns of subdued green, blue, white, and purple that give my home its even, geometric character.

In the center of the space is low, square bed, its cushions deep and welcoming. To our left is a long panel containing everything that I use for my work. Its controls blink at me from the corner of my eye.

I am looking at the solid, rectangular table to my right. Thati s where my true disc is sitting, its blue light pooling across the cold surface of the table.

Looking back over my shoulder to Tron as the door whisks shut behind him, I see the he, too, is stricken by the familiarity of this moment. I squeeze his hand, and then move across the room to the bed. Removing the disc that I have been safekeeping on my own back, I pull off my jacket, and cast off my gloves. He watches me as I pick the circlet of the disc up again, holding it in my bare hands.

The color mask on it has melted away, now that it is not attached to me. Its true color is a brilliant white, so bright it's illuminating my palms as I hold it.

Tron looks at it for a moment, and then turns completely around to stare at the blue disc on my table, and then whirls around again to stare at me. There is absolute disbelief in his every feature.

I smile, and turn the disc over shyly in my hands.

"There's a part of the story I didn't tell the others," I admit sheepishly, still running my hands around the disc. It takes me a moment before I can make eye contact. When I do, it is just as I pull the disc in my hands apart.

The matched set, one glowing orange when separated from the other and one his original white, each have a powerful energy of their own that I can feel just in holding them.

For the first time in my life, I am seeing Tron in a state of true shock. He hadn't ever hoped for this, so frail was his belief in his discs' survival.

He falls back a step, and leans his back against the wall, almost as if for support.

"How. Did. You. . . ?"

I smile at him.

"Come on, big program," I say with a near laugh, pointing, disc in hand, to my bed beside me, "have a seat."

He is watching me like he cannot believe that I'm real, his eyes flashing with a wild excitement, as he moves towards me.

I sit down beside him as he takes his place on the dark fabric of my bed.

"How about I tell you a story?" I ask, clicking his discs back together and holding them in my lap.

He simply looks at me, smiling a rueful half smile, and nods.


	29. We Don't Let Go

I think for a moment, but after telling stories all day, finding a way to begin comes quickly enough. I find myself speaking before I've even processed my systems command to do so.

"We," I begin, " that is, Radi, Shaddox, and I, had known for a long time that Flynn's disc was the only thing holding Clu back.

"We also knew that destroying it was the only way to keep Clu here, on the grid, and even more importantly, that if we could halt his advance on the User's word, we might finally be able to show the grid's citizens that he was as fallible as the rest of us. Just an administrative program gone awry."

"The problem with this, however, was finding Flynn and convincing him that the disc had to go; and if Clu couldn't do that with his endless resources, there was a significant chance that we wouldn't be able to, either. So Radi and Shaddox started working on a backup plan. I didn't expect, though . . . It was . . . Well, I suppose I was a fool not to have seen it coming."

Shaking my head, and staring absently at his disc in my lap, I am lost in the memory of my naivety.

"Shaddox was always so efficient. He had a strong moral center, but he was like you that way . . . he could make cold hearted choices when he had to. He always looked out for us. And Radi . . . Radi has always been brutal. I don't know what happened to her to make her that way, but she's always been like that. Unlike Shaddox, her only sense moral center was he own opinion of right and wrong.

"Knowing that, between the two of them I'd guess that it was Shaddox who suggested a last-ditch, slash and burn campaign, and Radi who decided the details."

The way he is looking at me, when I glance up at him from the corner of my eye, tells me that he's probably guessed exactly what happened, but he seems to want to hear me say it, anyway.

"Radi wanted to lead the party, but Shaddox won out. Said it was his responsibility. Besides, male programs were always less noticeable among Clu's ranks.

"The plan itself was to board Rectifier when Clu made his bid for the portal, armed with high-intensity light grenades, and bring her down over the sea of simulation. The team would be small, hitting six key points across the ship. If all went as it was supposed to, some hundred thousand soldiers, guardsmen, crewmen, and members of Clu's council would either be blown to deresolution, or destroyed by the sea.

"They saw it as a bold, overdue maneuver, a final solution. And that's what they called it. I saw it as a massacre of innocent, conscripted, repurposed programs that had no way of knowing what was coming. Maybe it was because I'd been like them once, but I empathized with them. I would have rather died fighting them hand to hand here in the grid then seen them destroyed without at least a chance at redemption or self defense.

"I remember the day I found out. . . I screamed at Shaddox for so long that my vocal systems started to short. Radi just watched. She just stood there leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, until Shaddox asked me to leave. Permanently. I wanted to stay, to push it just to spite him, but I knew deep in my code that I couldn't afford to. Not if I wanted make any real difference. So I let Radi pin my arms behind my back, and escort me out."

Tron makes that frustrated face again.

"They let themselves get desperate," he says flatly.

I nod.

"I had tried to tell Shaddox that if we could sneak ourselves onto Rectifier in the first place, we should be stick to original plan of destroying the disc; but they'd made up their minds. Radi thought that it would have been too easy for us to be caught that way, that it was too bold and bound to fail, considering the kind of security that Clu was likely to have around the disc."

Tron makes noise that's halfway between a snort and an exclamation, a hint of Rinzler's growl hiding under the sound.

"Four or five guards, and _Jarvis_," he corrects me, "don't deserve the title of 'security.' Sam Flynn and the IS- the girl," he seems to purposely avid classifying whoever he's referring to by her (impossible) race, maybe in defiance of Clu's old programming, "managed it with her hands cuffed behind her back."

I grimace.

"Exactly," I sigh, and make a note to ask him to tell me, someday, what happened up there where I couldn't see them. I'd seen Sam go up, and I'd seen Rinzler go up with a strange, dark haired captive, and I had seen Rinzler flying backwards over the ledge later on, but I have no idea what really happened in between these events.

"Anyway," I continue, shaking myself out of the reverie I've almost fallen into, "I came back here, and thought it over. My first instinct was to simply sabotage their mission, but I couldn't stay angry enough with them to stick to that particular, ludicrous, plan.

"So I started formulating how I could get to the disc myself, instead.

"I'm the one who prototyped Rectifier, after all," Tron actually looks amused by this, putting the pieces together as to why it had come out looking so much like Sark's old carrier. At the time, I'd been repurposed to believe Clu was the most glorious ruler known to program kind, but something in my code must have seen him for what he was, because It was no compliment of my part to relate _anyone_ to _Sark._

"So," I go on, "I knew that if the disc was going to be on board, it would be on the bridge. And I also knew that the most effective way of getting to it would be either to take the single elevator, or to use a light cable to repel up to it. The first one was obvious, and the second one was exhausting, but it didn't matter because, truth be told . . . I had never planned on making it out alive in the first place. That way, how much damage I sustained in the process didn't matter, as long as the disc was destroyed. The way I saw it, there would be no chance of me escaping once it was, anyway. Not working alone. Not with my programming. I knew it was a suicide mission from the start, but it made sense, I suppose. I just knew that it was better me than a hundred thousand unknowing soldiers and my misguided friends. It-"

I'm about to go on, but Tron cuts me off abruptly.

"That's not true," he says gruffly. It catches me off guard. I accepted the idea so long ago, the protest to my sacrifice seems foreign and weird.

"Of course it is," I say, though it takes me a moment to push the words out, as if he's taken my ability to speak with the original comment.

He just stares at me.

"If that were coming from _me,_" he mutters almost inaudibly, and then his eyes close for a moment, just slightly too long for a blink. But then he shakes his head, and looks back to me, the intensity I've always known in him returned to his face. His eyes are apprising. I'd forgotten how blue they were, dark (enough to be mistaken for hazel form a distance) and intense and unique.

"It isn't," he says, much louder, his tone still low and rumbling as he looks into me, continuing as if he hadn't made the other comment at all. I stare back at him, cocking my head just a little. He looks almost exasperated at the gesture.

"You have no idea, Yori," he says, growing quieter and looking me over once again. I can understand what he means, even though he doesn't make sense. He's referring to the value of my life, of course, but to something else hidden there as well. There's a guarded look in his eyes, like he is longing to do so, but doesn't trust himself to reach out for me.

I realize with a kind of warm half-surprise that he's leaving it all to me. Strange, how it always comes to this.

I lift his disc from my lap and set it carefully aside, and slide closer to him across the cushions. He remains utterly still, waiting for me, not entirely sure of my intensions.

"Close your eyes," I command him. Slowly, he submits, lowering his defenses and letting his lids fall shut.

Very slowly, and very gingerly, hesitant myself, I reach out and place my hand on his face.

He stays perfectly still.

I reach out with my other hand, and place it across the broad rise of his shoulder.

He takes a deep breath, but doesn't flinch, doesn't change, and I lean in, closer and closer until our noses brush.

I allow my lips to part, though his do not right away, and so, so gently, I close the distance between us until my mouth is pressed against his.

His reaction is slow at first, his lips moving but following the lead of my own. And then his hands come up, and close around my upper arms so tightly that they seem more like shackles than hands at all.

For a moment, terror rips through me.

And then, all at once, his uncomfortable grip flows into his intimidating strength, and he lifts me up onto his lap in one, swift, welcome movement.

The unnerving hold then transforms again, loosening to a stiffened, hesitant, but passionate running of his hands down my arms, all the way to my wrists, and then all the way back up to my shoulders. I abandon caution under their halting caress, and throw myself into our embrace.

Our arms move at the same moment, his hands consuming my waist, my right hand finding itself twisted into his hair while my left finds some semblance of grip against his back, pressing against it, as we pull ourselves into one another.

We have never kissed like this before.

With every moment, with every surge of energy that passes through our circuits, we are fighting the physical limitations of our bodies to be closer that we were an instant before. Our mouths at times seem locked in place, as if no amount of energy could persuade us to unlock them long enough to even re-establish their position. There's a tangible magnetism between us, holding us, a connection that throbs without exchange of energy, words, or thought.

A nano passes, though, and we now find ourselves instead in a flurry of moment, my upper lip pressed between both of his only to be exchanged a moment later for an unplanned instant in which it _his_ lip caught against the gentle pressure of my teeth, this itself only a temporary brush that melts into yet another joining of our mouths.

Our hands cannot stay still. The pressure is constant, though, pulling each of us against the other till we fall back from the fervor of our movement into the depths of the dark cushions. Even our legs become tangled as my hands find his chest and his run from the base of my back to the depths of my hair as I lie across his body. Even gravity seems to want to bring us closer.

And yet, no energy passes between us as we move. There is nothing sensual about this act.

Instead, we are caught in a frenzy of proximity, battling for a closeness that defies al the distance of time and trouble between us. It is a battle that we're winning. Our lips can't seem to part long enough for us to even breathe.

Still, we cannot, we will not stop. We are finally, completely, together again, and the last thing we will do now is part.

And so, we hold each other. And we kiss as if all the world is ending.

And we do not let go.

* * *

Author's note: I don't usually beg for feedback, not explicitly, but this thing is a product of last Monday's being Valentines Day, too much DeVotchKa and Mumford & Sons listening while writing, and seeing Spring Awakening, and I can't say I really planned it . . . which makes for a distinct possibility of it either being brilliant, or abysmal in my readers minds; and I must know. O.O

I'd also like to thank you all once again for reading, as this story is starting to come to a close, and I'm going to try and just let it flow and not bug you with author's notes for the remainder of it. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Oh, and sorry about my updates slowing down some, I'm now dividing myself between this and "Through Broken Eyes," which will be my big ongoing project when this tale ends. The first two chapters of that are up, by the way, (hint-hint, wink-wink, nudge-nudge) if anybody is interested! XD

Thanks again everyone for reading and reviewing, and I hope you enjoy the rest!

End of line.


	30. Reboot

"Which was it?"

His voice interrupts the trance I've fallen into. I've been resting my head on his chest, tucked neatly with the top of it tucked into the curve where his neck meets his shoulder. Absently, I've also begun tracing the outline of the four squares of his chest delicately with my fingernail, watching my own incremental progress around the shapes from where I lie. His arms are loosely wrapped around me. We have, for the moment, finally returned to a normal pattern of breathing, and instead find ourselves more at risk of falling into standby right where we are than we are of kissing again.

"Huh?" I ask, lifting my head to look down to his face.

"The elevator or the cable?" his hand reaches up absently and removes a strand of my hair from in front of my face. His face is calm.

I smile. It is wide and easy, not a familiar expression these days, but so natural.

"Neither, actually."

His eyebrows pull together, but his mouth is amused.

"I never made it up to the bridge," I explain, "I saw Sam Flynn and that girl . . ."

"I _Think_ her name was Quorra..." he offers, "She was travelling with Flynn. An ISO."

I'm sure my eyes widen when he says this, because it seems so impossible, but it's a story for another time, and I elect not to pursue it.

"Alright then, Quorra. I saw them escape to the flight deck, and saw that the power surge from the disc had gone dark elsewhere in the ship. I realized it was out of my hands before I ever made my bid for the top."

He lifts his eyebrows, now intrigued and therefore immune to the way that I am, rather coyly, playing with his hair. I smile and shake my head.

"Right," I sigh, "I was telling you a story, wasn't I?"

He looks at me expectantly, and I settle my head against his chest again, speaking into his ear as I turn to the last chapter of my tale.


	31. The Best Laid Plans

My light jet hummed beneath me as I flew in behind rectifier from the rear cargo segment of the solar sailor I'd climbed aboard nearly a milicycle earlier. I'd designed it myself, and the only lights on it, besides the trail it was capable of producing, were those of the controls. As the sailor docked, I was flying overhead, cutting silently through the fog.

I'd waited until the recognizer that had been trailing the sailor passed it. Its pilot seemed intent on intercepting the craft, and I suspected I wasn't the only stowaway on board. However, I had already decided to work alone; and while I knew who I hoped was at the other end of the sailor, I wasn't ready to risk everything I had at stake to find out.

Rectifier loomed up below me as I flew, its black and orange burning and poisoning the clouds around it with rashes of light. Still, it was a beautiful piece of engineering, and I wasn't sorry (at least according to my plans,) that it would go on to fly another day.

This wasn't the only unapologetic thought I'd had in the course of this. I'd come to terms with everything that I was going to do, and with everything that I had done. I had made my peace. With everyone, that is, but Rinzler.

I should have stayed.

I'd always felt I should have stayed. I should have tried to save him just as he had saved me. Tron. I should have saved Tron. I knew that, logically, I wouldn't have known where to start but I still felt like when he had needed me most, I had run away. And, to make things worse, I would never have the chance to tell him how wrong I had been for doing so; because if I saw him at all tonight, it was probably going to be at the moment he killed me.

No matter what had gotten into him when he decided that I should live the first time, if I did this . . . it would destroy everything Clu had worked for. And Rinzler would never forgive such a severe offense against his master, regardless of who had committed it.

In a way, though, I wasn't so unhappy anymore with the idea of it being him who ended my life. I'd come to see him as separated from Tron in the cycles that had passed, and while it pained me beyond comprehension to think of dying at Tron's hand, if Rinzler didn't recognize me and didn't see me as Tron had, then in some twisted fashion, it wasn't quite the same. And while it a horrific nightmare of an idea to which Tron would, blessedly, never wake to realize, if Rinzler really was all that was left, then this was really something that I owed him.

I suppose I was hoping that, though I couldn't save him, at least I could bring him some semblance of closure. In destroying one of Clu's enemies, he would feel he'd done the right thing, and through this I could, if nothing else, offer him peace.

What Rinzler would perceive as peace, anyway. I knew that Tron would never live to know it for himself. I had realized that, with Flynn's disc gone, and in that manner much of Flynn's power, there would be no hope left for his return.

If my plan worked, then the users would be safe, as he would have wanted, but that would still leave the grid. And I hoped for the best; that perhaps the grid's citizens would see Clu fail and rise up in the face of his vulnerability . . . but I had no way of knowing. And even if they didn't, it wouldn't matter. Rinzler was going to remain exactly as he was.

If the programs rebelled, and were successful, he would be overpowered by the mob along with Clu's entire regime, and they would destroy him. He would die as Rinzler.

Or, if Cu prevailed, and there was no uprising ( or the uprising was squelched), then it would be his master's hold that would keep him as he was. And he'd go on like that. He'd live as Rinzler.

I had prayed for cycle after cycle for some kind of miracle, or some chance to go back and try to save him before it was too late, but the cold truth of it was that Tron was never coming back. And so I owed him.

I owed him, because I knew that I was sentencing him to a continuation of life as Rinzler.

The alternative, though, was certain death by suicide bombing, and knowingly allowing him to be killed was something that I was simply too weak to do . . . Despite the fact that he would have preferred death to remaining as Rinzler had he been able to make the choice.

But I was just _too weak. _And as a result, I had failed him. I had failed both of us. . .

The one thing, though, that I had never failed, was my system.

It was for that system that I now disengaged my light jet, dropping from the air onto the deck of Rectifier and rolling into a summersault upon impact. I came up again on my feet, and glanced around.

The view was tainted by my helmet. I'd dressed to fit the part, mimicking the circuits of a newer program with the download I wore. The outfit was black guard orange to a sickening degree, and included a square jawed, pitch dark helmet and visor. The false circuits silhouetted my actual pattern, but that was a detail I'd included solely for myself, once which would go unnoticed. To anyone else's eyes, I looked precisely like one of the few women in Clu's arsenal should have: ready to serve and excessively orange.

My survey brought positive results. I was in the clear.

I made my way quickly across the flat expanse of the uppermost deck, to the nearest elevator pad. It appeared as a lowing circle in the decks surface, and as I stepped onto it, it slipped neatly downward and deposited me a level below.

I found myself in a dark utility passage, illuminated only by intermittent controls on the walls, and two single bars of orange that ran the length of the floor and ceiling. I was utterly alone.

I looked up to the clouds above me through the opening left in the ceiling by the lowered elevator pad, watching the energy that pulsed through them constantly. It seemed to dance as it erratically illuminated each hazy cloud, and then disappeared again. But I stepped off of the circle of the pad then, and it whisked itself back into place, cutting me off from the view and instead leaving me in the darkness of the passage.

I turned, and made way through it at a sprint. The door at the end whisked aside to allow me through into a well lit central chamber, but revealed something I had not fully prepared myself to see.

From the balcony on which I'd found myself, I could see below me a seemingly endless army of repurposed programs, all burning orange and carrying viciously adapted staffs that came to unnerving points at one end. The sea of them, all in varying statures and yet so terrifyingly identical, was entirely still. They stood at attention, faces fixated in one direction, visors ending just above their mouths. The expressions on those mouths were all the same: hard, unforgiving, and awaiting orders. They were all pale, too, even by _old_ system standards. We've never looked as flushed as our users, but the whiteness of these soldiers' lips was disturbing in its severity, and sent a shock of discomfort and cold through my circuits. I turned away.

The helm was away to my left, and so I followed the narrow catwalk in that direction, now moving at the professional yet strangely subdued pace of a worker; efficient, but not excessive. I had to if I was going to blend in, and blending in was in and of itself of the utmost importance. There were guards everywhere below me, after all, every last one of them scanning the room.

I wanted to run, though. I wanted to make an all out assault on the discs location; for at that moment, previously invisible blackened bars of circuitry sparked to life throughout the ship.

The disc was in place.

I was running out of time . . . I had to move faster. I glanced through the dark haze of my helmet to the guards below. Their attention, now, was on the illuminating circuits and a place somewhere ahead where I assumed Clu would soon appear. I hastened, hoping they would maintain their focus, stepping silently and hugging the wall.

As I made my way towards the bridge, I drew level with a wide platform, a podium from which Clu would speak to his army. Realizing that I was no standing where the guard had fixated their attention, I slowed again, and even moved cautiously to the rail with the intention of taking some kind of inventory on Clu's location.

Sure enough, he was down there. He wasn't on the podium, though, but behind it, trailed by guards and speaking to someone.

For a moment, I was distracted by the subject of his attentions. It was Quorra, black hair and exposed shoulders creating a stark contrast that was noticeable even before I'd focused in on her. Clu, for his part, was tugging absently on her sleeve, and smiling gruesomely. I shuddered. Though I had no idea why she was relevant at the time( I, like most everyone in this system, believed that all of the ISOs had been eradicated within the first quarter cycle of Clu's reign,) I sensed something unusually in the gesture.

I didn't watch her for long, though. I was distracted by the figure standing just behind her. He gave himself away just by standing: There was the familiar posture, ready for commands, seemingly benign, head lowered, yet daunting. Rinzler always held himself like a caged animal, like a light grenade ready to engage. It made him unmistakable.

Clu was looking towards him now, and his head jerked down once in a short nod as he received a command. He abruptly took his captive by the arm and turned to lead her away, but he impressed me, somehow, with the motion. He seemed to have made his point about her capacity to escape from him, and as he walked her away, he was harmless and gentle with his grip. He was steering her, not forcing her.

A pang of guilt, sadness, and recognition shot through me. There below me was the same Rinzler who had once saved my life, the same Rinzler who had once been, and some fragile ways still was, the program for whom I'd been intended since the moment of my activation. My counterpart.

This stray thought led me into a sharp, irrational longing to have his hand on my arm as he did on his captive's. He wasn't Tron, but so much of me still wanted a final moment of closeness with whatever fragments of Tron might still be left. I tried to push the thought away, but I was halted by my own system.

It had flagged the notion.

All of this time, I had been planning to sneak up to where the disc was being held (using the elevator, I'd decided eventually, due to the general non-athleticism of my programming,)but I'd had the wrong idea. Why sneak up when I could be brought right to it?

The only location in that direction, I remembered from the ship's prototype, where a prisoner might be held was either a storage compartment that didn't have so much as a lock on the door, or the bridge itself. That, therefore, had to be where he was taking her. And if I could appear to him as a should-be-prisoner with the same level of importance as this woman, then he should, logically, take me too.

I took off at a full sprint, abandoning all other concerns. If I could intercept him before he arrived at the elevator, all I would have to do would be to deactivate my disguise and his resulting confusion and (probably) irritation upon recognizing me should do the rest. It was so simple.

I caught glimpses of elevator as I ran, through ventilation gaps and viewing portals, and I bore witness to Sam Flynn pulling himself up to its ceiling via the transparent elevator shaft. I saw enough to establish that he was launching his own assault before the view disappeared again. For a moment, I couldn't help but think that everything was going to come together, that I was going to find myself fighting side by side with a user once again and that together we would triumph, and all my hope would be restored.

But I had miscalculated. I was never meant to make it there in time. As I skidded onto the elevator platform at last, my gaze was met by the elevator pad itself disappearing up through the ceiling and into the elevator shaft above.

Rinzler, his captive, and my perfect solution were already far out of reach.


	32. My True Intended Purpose

I screamed after them, but it was too late. I was alone in the small room where the elevator platform was located, everyone else listening to Clu thunder away in some other part of the ship, and my time was running out.

I was going to fail.

Frantic, I ran up to the void beneath the elevator shaft. I could see the elevator pad halted at the top, far above my head. I had to get up there.

I whipped one of two batons I was carrying from my thigh, and withdrew my disc, a forgery I'd made especially for this mission.

I had decided against using my light cable and climbing up the side of the elevator shaft to get to the bridge initially because I was concerned that I wouldn't have the strength to both make the climb and obtain the disc; let alone to destroy it.

But now, not only had my newly formed, seemingly perfect plan fallen through, but the elevator I'd intended to use was now being detained above me by a captive stranger and the most dangerous program in the system. The plan, then, had been forced to morph into me somehow making my way up and out of the elevator shaft to the deck above, attaching my light cables to the ceiling of the elevator, and essentially run up the side of the building while the cables retracted, pulling me up so that I emerged on my feet and at the ready at the top.

I would then have to battle my way through an unknown number of programs, Rinzler included.

Yes, I was absolutely going to die.

But I was not giving up.

The first step was to make my way to the deck. I took the disc in my hand, and flung it upwards into the elevator shaft. It was my ability to calculate trajectory, not my throwing power, that made it ricochet through the cylindrical space and break through. The space it left behind, pieces of the wall it shattered clattering to the ground around my head, was generally Yori sized.

The disc itself didn't return, this much due to my minimal skills in using it, but I didn't need it. If I was going to be fighting anyone, it would be with the tools in my batons anyway. Using one of them, I sent a light cable up through the hole I'd made, and it latched itself to the deck outside. I retracted it, letting it pull me upwards, ungracefully scraping me against the wall for a moment before it tugged me out onto the deck.

I had let out more cable than I had expected, and I traveled further than I had intended across the surface of the deck as a result. I found myself unnervingly close to the edge of a massive void in its surface, which provided the ventilation for two massive turbines. Their metal blades, slicing through the air with a repetitive thumping sound, were only an arm's length away. I scrambled backwards.

I realized, though, before retreating, that there was at least one fragment of data lying at the edge of the deck next to the exposed turbine. It was a pixel from a derezzed program.

I grimaced, wooziness sweeping through me, and looked up. Sure enough, the trajectory of a body falling from the elevator ended where the turbines rotor blades began. Somebody had taken that fall, and that could only mean one thing: there was a battle raging above me.

Sudden darkness closed in around me. Everything was going wrong.

Still defiant, though, to the point of desperation, I stood, and cried out uncontrollably. It was my own battle cry, I suppose. As the sound ravaged my throat, I was drawing my batons. The scream, however, was drowned out by the sound of the steady thumping and roaring of the turbines beside me. I was the only one who would ever hear it, and the rage it contained.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Dying was one thing, and it was something I welcomed, but failing was something else entirely. Something that should never have been allowed, but which the odds were rapidly beginning to suggest.

Everything had gone sour. Somewhere on board, my companions were planting bombs. Above me, Rinzler, potentially his captive, whatever security force was around the disc, and Sam Flynn were all involved in a potentially deadly confrontation.

Looking up towards the bridge, this thought was proven with ironic precision as a disc went flying out of the open-walled elevator, missing someone who was standing either on it or in front of it. I wondered who it was . . .

My attention was captured suddenly by the answer; a movement from the elevator itself drawing my eye. Though no disc passed or appeared to have impacted him, my gaze was met by the image of Rinzler thumbing backwards into thin air.

I cried out to him instinctually, but it was silenced by the roar of the turbines and the shield of my helmet. Both his discs were in hand, engaged, as he fell, but his fingers opened up around them, and they careened away from him through the air.

I still can't fathom how he did what he did next. Somehow inverting himself in mid air, kicking off of the wall of the elevator shaft, he brought himself face to face with its surface, and took hold. I couldn't see what he was gripping, whether he'd broken through the glass and created a handhold or if there was one already present, but his weight came down on it, and it held. And then, with one painstaking, inching movement after another, he began to pull himself up again using only the strength of his arms.

I could have watched the entire process. It was incredible. But his discs had captured my eye, as well, and as one cruised off towards the open air to the ships starboard side, and the other dropped, deactivated, in a near perfect free fall towards the unforgiving blades of Rectifier's turbines, I realized that there_ was_ something left that I could do.

I didn't think about it, I just calculated. My vision was cut through by lines of trajectory, rates of descent working themselves out in the margins. I tightened my grip on my batons, and let loose.

Light cables in the pure blue of my own energy whipped through the air as I ran forward, towards the turbines.

I felt sudden tension in the lines as each of them made contact with the falling discs, and I threw myself down onto the deck to brace myself. My face was over the gap, the rotor blades turning under me, so close I could feel the air being pulled into them trying to draw me in with it. I held myself there, my entire body stiff, holding my arms out to my sides so that I was spread eagle on the deck in a simultaneous effort to recapture the discs and to not fall to my death.

There was a clatter as the cables returned, withdrew, and deactivated, letting their quarry fall to the deck beside me, miraculously intact.

Energy pulsating wildly through me, and for a moment, despite my precarious position, I couldn't move. Then I revived myself, and wriggled cautiously backwards until I was safely away from the edge, grabbing the discs as I went.

I pulled myself back against the wall of the elevator shaft, vaguely aware that a bar of orange circuitry had just gone dark across the ship. Flynn's disc was gone. I'd missed my chance.

But it didn't matter. This was a user's battle now. And I had just found something infinitely more precious.

In that moment, everything had changed. My purpose was no longer Flynn's disc, or the resistance, or even myself. It was preserving _these_ discs, and the impossible hope they represented.

Looking up, I saw Rinzler swing his feet up over his head, and disappear from view onto the elevator. He didn't turn back, though. He didn't know that what he had lost had been saved.

But I knew. In my hands I looked down to see the two halves of his completed disc . . . the gateway through which Clu had infiltrated his system, the hub of all of his information. All of the things that made him Rinzler were in those discs.

But so were all of the things that made him Tron.

There was hope for him, and I, suddenly, had become its keeper.

I was suddenly very, very unwilling to die. I carefully pressed the discs, both of them deactivated, together, and they joined as if they'd been designed to do so from their inception. It was mystifying, to feel them unite, to see how they melted seamlessly into one. How had he done it?

Gingerly, I reached behind me, and placed them on my own back. For a moment, I cringed, their foreign, contaminated energy striking out against my own, nearly overwhelming me. Warnings and competing instructions clouded my vision, and I felt violent compulsions seething through me, as well as the pain of foreign energy and the impressive strength of his being. His functions slammed through me, commanding me to do things I didn't even have the physical capabilities to do. It was sheer, excruciatingly painful, chaos.

I could feel his personality, his very being, melding with my own, seeping into me and finding incongruent circuits that confounded the even workings of his upgrades. Everything in my vision turned orange . . . but then it snapped back to blue. My own designation flashed and held in my vision; and then, almost as if the discs themselves had elected to do so, the attempted sync aborted, and I was left shaking but invigorated, with my systems clear once again.

I was startled by vibrations in the elevator shaft at my back. The elevator pad was descending, being summoned from below by what had to have been an infuriated Clu. I had to get out, and get Rinzler's discs to safety. Now.

I stood, and bolted, scooping my batons from the deck where they'd fallen as I went. I ran towards the edge, and jumped.

I fell for a moment before I activated my light jet. I was unnervingly close to the uneven ground, but below Rectifier now and out of sight. I loitered under its belly, catching my breath and adjusting to flying with Rinzler's upgrades nagging me to allow them to take over. I circled around several times, and as I did, lost in thought, I caught a glimpse of several light jets taking off over the sea in hot pursuit of a softly glowing white plane. One of them was yellow. Several of them were guards. And one of them, I knew, was Rinzler. Whatever happened to Rectifier now, in those events in which I lacked the skills or circumstances in which to intervene, Rinzler would be safe.

Knowing this, I took off, flying away and leaving Rectifier in the distance behind me. I knew what I supposed to do, now. And with his discs on my back, the first fragment of true hope I had felt for this system in a thousand cycles began taking root in my systems.


	33. Here We Are

"With Flynn's disc removed, and Clu deprived of his way out, I had hoped that the resistance would stop the bomb. Maybe they did, I'll never know. But I wouldn't have been able to stop them myself, and it wouldn't have mattered if I had. With the shockwave of Clu's reintegration. . . There was nothing anyone could have done.

But, despite everything that's wrong with this system, perhaps that's exactly how it was supposed to end. Sometimes, it's not within our control. We're subject to the forces of the unseen.

"And then, here we are."

We're sitting again, facing each other and near to resting against one another, and I pick up his disc again absently as I trail off. Gently twisting my wrists, I draw them apart. He leans in to examine them more closely.

One is still the orange color that I assume belonged to its original owner, but the other, like Tron's circuits, pulses with blinding, pure, white light. It had rebooted itself inexplicably by the time I landed my jet again, mere minutes before the last, distant echoes of the reintegration shockwave threw me off of my feet and sent me sprawling across the hard outland ground where I'd stopped to further examine my quarry. They'd been easier to wear after that, and I've hardly removed them since. I've been carrying them with me, working around them and with them, all this time. Looking at him now, though, I realize that the burden of another's identity is no longer mine. It's time for Tron to be reunited with them, once and for all.

I press them back into one unit, and present it to him on my open palms. For a moment, he seems uncertain. And then he looks at me.

"Yori," he begins, but I stop him.

"Always," I say, and he understands what I mean. He nods, looking warmly into my eyes, and takes the disc in his own hand, feeling its energy. He looks at it for a moment, and then it whirrs to life, activated. He raises it, and stares the weapon down for a moment. It retains its color. Then he shuts it down again, the saw blade of its edge halting and becoming dark. His face is defiant, his mouth set, his eyes slightly narrowed as he stares it down. He looks amazing in his moment, so impossibly like himself; even some of the color almost seems to have returned to his face.

"This code disc means freedom," he says ruefully, reflecting, on something his eyes say he remembers, but that I myself must never have witnessed. It's a defiant choice of words, as we both know that having a backup could be the deciding factor in whether he stays Tron, or returns to Rinzler.

But he has made his choice, and there is no turning back now. His voice is clean, cutting, but gentle, and quiet as he speaks. He is ready.

He places both hands on the disc, and takes a long look at is as he prepares to return it to its rightful place. I place my hand on his folded knee. I can sense his energy flowing in unison with my own. We've survived to see this moment. And we will continue to do so. Together, we look upon the disc in his hands as he begins to raise it.

Eager, anxious, and hopeful, we wait to see what will happen next. 

End of Line.


End file.
